


Strange Interlude

by ELG



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: M/M, Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 15:49:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 267,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/725045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel discovers that in other universes not only the uniforms are different …</p><p>Jack and Daniel's friendship has been under strain for some time but when Daniel is kidnapped by an AU Teal’c very different from our own, it's up to Jack to save him. An AU Jack, however, complicates the situation considerably.</p><p>Spoilers: Takes place during S4, spoilers up to and including most of S4, including 4.01 Small Victories, 4.12 Tangent, 4.13 The Curse, and 4.14 Serpent's Venom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Wiles of the Stranger

Strange Interlude

One would be in less danger  
From the wiles of the stranger  
If one's own kin and kith  
Were more fun to be with  
Ogden Nash

I: The Wiles of the Stranger

 

It was like a garment fraying down the seam, another stitch pulling loose every day, the rent a little larger, then a little larger still. Soon there was going to be nothing but an ugly tear, too jagged to ever mend…

_"Off-world activation…"  
_  
The warning alarm rang throughout the SGC to resound through the office cluttered with archaeological artifacts and piles of books. It sounded urgent and serious; an interruption to peaceful research, but Daniel exhaled in relief. "Saved by the bell," he murmured. 

Having been interrupted mid-lecture, Jack darted him a suspicious glance. "What?"

Daniel looked up at him innocently. "What?"

"Did you take in what I just said to you?"

"Yes."

"About following orders, not touching things when you don't know what they do, shutting up when I tell you to shut up, and generally doing as I damn well tell you?"

Daniel moistened his lips. "Jack, you are getting seriously cranky in your old age."

"And you came _this_ close to being killed!"

"We made a difference. We got through to Ephazion. The people of that world will now…"

Jack grabbed Daniel by the front of the jacket and hauled him to his feet. "Daniel, I swear to God I am so close to hitting you right now."

Looking into those familiar brown eyes in disbelief, Daniel realized Jack wasn't exaggerating. The man clearly _was_ very close to taking a swing at him. He was as shocked by it as he was confused. He didn't know where all this rage was coming from or even if it was truly aimed at him, only that it was starting to eat into their friendship like acid. "But, Jack, it all worked out fine for – "

The grip on Daniel's jacket tightened in unmistakable warning. "There are only so many times you can go and tap dance your way along a tightrope over a swimming pool of man-eating sharks and make me watch it. Sooner or later I am going to stop caring or I am going to kill you myself. You told me it was death to argue with the – king of that place. You told me that about ten seconds after we got through the gate."

Jack was like a wall at the moment. A blank façade with nothing behind it. It wasn't like talking to anyone he knew, more like a stranger, yet one who had inexplicably built up four years worth of hostility towards him. Daniel shifted uncomfortably. "Don't you want to know who's visiting?" 

The man's chocolate-colored gaze didn't so much as flicker. "You told me that because – and I quote – you didn't want me 'mouthing off to a tyrant' and getting myself killed."

"I heard General Hammond say 'open the iris' but there aren't any teams off-world at the moment so it must be the Tollan or the Tok'ra…" Daniel offered. He was starting to see how his behavior on P74-659 might possibly have been perceived as 'reckless' by Jack even though he didn't actually agree with him. Jack had been getting very strict about what he called 'reckless' behavior recently. Actually Jack had been getting strict about everything recently, and he seemed to have had a sense of humor bypass along the way. Daniel was trying not to get into yet another fight with the man because he was exhausted with fighting with him, but when Jack was in this mood it was difficult not to snap back at him. He'd worked hard for his current position in this friendship as an equal and he wasn't prepared to give it up without a struggle. 

Jack, however, seemed determined not to give him an inch. All he was showing to the world was the military guy he'd used to be; the human being had vanished somewhere and Daniel missed him, and in missing him seriously resented this stranger with his face who was blocking his access to his good-humored kind-hearted friend. Stranger Jack was still talking and his face was an unreadable mask:

"But you still went and gave that guy a lecture about why he was wrong to continue the war against the Dedrazari even after he'd told you he was going to have you executed if you said one more word."

"I just thought he was a reasonable man who was clearly capable of – "

"Well, I used to be a reasonable, man, Daniel, but a few more missions with you where you pull that kind of stunt and I am going to be getting very _un_ reasonable. If you'd been within punching distance I would have decked you on 659, and if you _ever_ ignore me when I've told you to shut the hell up again I will damned well shoot you myself. Do I make myself clear?"

Daniel darted a reproachful glance at his friend but Jack had his dead-eyed Black Ops face on. He had to admit he could never entirely suppress a tiny twinge of fear when Jack looked like that. He muttered resentfully, "Yes, Colonel O'Neill, sir."

A finger was waved under his nose. "Don't push your luck."

"What luck?" Daniel retorted. 

 

O'Neill abruptly let him go then walked out into the corridor, into the comfort of unchanging grayness. He didn't even look back to see if Daniel was following. He knew what that last crack had meant. There had been a time when Daniel had been enjoying himself working for the SGC. When the SGC had seemed like family to him; when SG-1 in general and O'Neill in particular had seemed to provide everything Daniel had lost when his parents had been killed, then lost again when he'd been forced to leave Abydos to look for his wife. Even after Sha're had died, Daniel had received comfort, company and support from the man he considered his best friend. But in recent months Jack had withdrawn from him, and O'Neill knew that as well as anyone. 

What he didn't know was why. His annoyance with Daniel was like a permanent itch he couldn't scratch and he had no idea what was causing it. He couldn't think of anything Daniel had done to him to make him so resentful but his temper was fraying at the slightest provocation, and every time it happened he was hammering another nail into the coffin of their friendship. The thought of losing Daniel's friendship would be enough to make him bite his tongue for a couple of hours or even days after a particularly bad outburst on his part, but then the annoyance would well up once more, like pus from an infected wound, and he would snap at him again, slowly bludgeoning what had once been trust into wariness, affection into an answering resentment. He was driving Daniel away, telling him with words and body language to keep his distance, but he had no more idea why he was doing it than Daniel did, and he didn't seem able to stop himself. He kept telling himself their friendship was still there waiting for him, like a ready meal in the deep freeze, he'd just dig it out and defrost it and it would be every bit as good as when he'd put it on ice. But all Daniel was seeing was that the guy who had used to be his friend was now freezing him out.

And in the meantime the fear of losing Daniel's friendship was making him kill it even faster. He was like someone without enough gas in the car putting his foot down so he'd have the worst over with as soon as possible. He was _losing_ Daniel's friendship every day, deliberately pushing the guy away. So far Daniel had come back after each little rejection. Or at least hung around waiting to see when he was going to be allowed back into the warm glow of their previous relationship. But he didn't know how long that was going to last. Daniel had a lot of patience but it wasn't infinite. O'Neill knew that if things went on like this Daniel might ask for a transfer, and his fear of losing what he had was making him impossible. He was having nightmares about his team dying every night now. And in particular about Daniel dying, which he suspected was because Daniel was so freakin' reckless even his subconscious had obviously made a note of it. 

An inner voice kept telling him: _O'Neill, piss or get off the damned pot_ , but he didn't know what pot it was his subconscious thought he was sitting on and it wasn't telling him squat.

***

Daniel knew there was something seriously _up_ with Jack. He just didn't know what. He'd tried talking to both Sam and Teal'c about it but they'd insisted they couldn't see any difference in him. And when he'd observed Jack with Sam and Teal'c he _didn't_ seem any different with them. Suggesting it was only Daniel Jack had a problem with because Jack had certainly become a much chillier person to know recently if your name was Daniel Jackson. Lots of little gestures Daniel realized he had pretty much taken for granted had been withdrawn in recent weeks. Those little pats on the shoulder, the enquiries as to whether Daniel was okay, Jack turning up at his office insisting he come out for a meal or a drink or to watch yet another hockey game. He presumed that he and Jack were still supposed to be friends. Jack hadn't told him otherwise. But all the little ways by which Jack _showed_ him they were friends had been withdrawn. 

"Daniel?" 

Daniel collected himself and looked across at Jacob who was gazing at him in some surprise. When Daniel looked around the table he realized everyone was staring at him. He hadn't even known he was in the briefing room for a minute there. He really did need to cut back on the coffee and get a little more sleep. General Hammond was frowning. Sam was looking as though she would have liked to pass him a note under the table to help him out but wasn't sure which question he was stuck on. Teal'c was raising an eyebrow at him. Jack was looking irritable and almost out of patience. No change there then.

Daniel decided to be straightforward. He gave Jacob an apologetic glance. "I'm sorry, I wasn't listening."

"Are you feeling unwell, Doctor Jackson?"

Daniel saw the immediate concern in General Hammond's eyes and felt better. Guilty, but better. He decided a white lie for both their sakes might be in order. "I just have a headache."

Oh, that was clearly the wrong thing to say. Jack had evidently interpreted that as Daniel being a smartass and making a complaint about all the yelling he'd been doing at him recently. Daniel refused to look in his direction but was very aware of that glare lasering his cheekbone. 

Sam said, "Actually, Dad, I had a little trouble following what you were saying as well. You're telling us you've sent three Tok'ra operatives to this Stargate address and because none of them have come back you want _us_ to go?"

There was a lot behind her words that Daniel understood all too well. Their relationship with the Tok'ra had always been complicated but it had definitely become more so in recent months. The Tok'ra's less than loveable habit of using their Tau'ri allies as human guinea-pigs still rankled. But, while it had been annoying when Anise had done it, it was downright upsetting to think Selmac and Jacob would also agree to it.

"Not SG-1," said Jacob quickly. "A different SG team."

"Why?" Jack's tone was not encouraging and Daniel didn't blame him. He wondered if having a Tok'ra inside you made you start thinking like a Tok'ra after a while. If you started believing any sacrifice was worthwhile if you struck a blow for the right side in the battle against the Goa'uld.

Jacob returned the man's gaze unflinchingly. "Because we have reason to believe there is a Goa'uld killing device operating around that Stargate. Perhaps a form of defense shield, which is activated when any Goa'uld or Jaffa steps through it. That automatically disqualifies SG-1, but as yours is the only SG team with a Jaffa among it members, it doesn't disqualify anyone else."

"How do you know it isn't just zapping everyone?"

"Because a human who was about to be blended with a Tok'ra volunteered to step through the gate and no harm came to him. But he found no trace of the Tok'ra who had been through before him. He made a quick survey of the area and then came home. Unfortunately his health was too poor to allow him to return for a second visit and he had to blend with Karesh to save his life."

Daniel looked back at Jack. It seemed to him that Jacob was keeping things from them but he would just like it confirmed he wasn't the only one assuming it. One look at the way Sam was frowning and Teal'c's expression told him he was definitely not alone in his suspicions here. Jack's incisive words gave him more confirmation: "Okay, Jacob, now how about you tell us all the things you're _not_ telling us?"

Jacob sighed and looked at Hammond. "I told you there was no reason to bring SG-1 in on this. All I need is your authorization to borrow a different SG team."

Hammond shook his head. "Sorry, Jacob. I brought SG-1 in on this because I happen to trust their judgment. I'm not lending you any teams unless I know what you want to borrow them for."

"Okay. Bottom line. There is a signal emanating from that gate which offers help to any enemy of the Goa'uld. Before he was forced to return by his rapidly worsening health, the guy who went through managed to 'film' for want of a better word, a lot of the interior. There was something that looked like a quantum mirror in an inner chamber but one that was much larger than anything we've seen before and with a different control device. We're presuming this might be the weapon. Or if not the mirror itself then something else made by the same people. As these are clearly people whose technology is far in advance of anything shared by the Goa'uld, we want to make contact if we possibly can."

Sam shook her head. "I don't know, Dad. It sounds like a trap to me. Whoever these people are they clearly don't want to make friends with the Tok'ra, and they might already have killed or kidnapped three of your operatives."

"Except the Asgard have also left devices in place which might well be dangerous to the Tok'ra," Teal'c put in impassively. "We have no proof that the hammer device on Cimmeria would be capable of differentiating between a Tok'ra and a Goa'uld, and yet the intentions of the Asgard were undoubtedly good. And they have proven themselves to be powerful allies against the Goa'uld in the past."

Daniel saw Jack sigh and couldn't help feeling the same way. It hadn't seemed that long ago that everything was going their way. Sokar was dead. Apophis was dead. Earth was part of the Protected Planets Treaty, and they had the Asgard on their side; pretty impressive allies by anyone's standards. Since then they'd had to face the fact they'd been instrumental in giving Apophis Sokar's powerbase on a plate. Their agreement with the System Lords was not going to help them against Apophis. And the Asgard had so many problems in their own galaxy it was unlikely they were going to be able to help them in a war that was now seeming inevitable. There were days when even the Tok'ra seemed like the kind of allies they might be better off without.

Teal'c seemed to be thinking along the same lines. He looked at Jack and continued quietly, "I do not see that we have any choice, O'Neill. Now Apophis has the army of Sokar at his disposal…"

"I know." Jack turned to General Hammond. "Sir, I think Carter, Daniel and I should go take a looksee."

"Not Sam." 

Daniel was pleased by the swiftness of Jacob's interruption, glad of the proof that Jacob didn't want his daughter exposed to unnecessary danger.

Jacob looked embarrassed and shrugged. "We don't know how sophisticated this equipment is. It might be able to detect even a protein marker."

Jack glanced across at Daniel for the first time in much too long. "Looks like it's you and me."

Jacob said urgently. "George, you can't just let the two of them go. Send a different team."

Jack returned his gaze unflinchingly. "According to you this is a walk in the park. Daniel and I go over there, pick up the mirror, come straight back. What's the problem?"

"What's your problem, Jack?" Jacob retorted. "I never took you for a glory hunter. So why don't you let someone else have a turn?"

"Because I don't trust the Tok'ra," Jack returned harshly. "And while I don't think Selmac would sacrifice Daniel and me unless he absolutely had to, I think he just might sacrifice a bunch of humans he doesn't even know. Is that clear enough for you?"

There was a shocked silence in which Daniel could hardly bear to see Sam's face. He risked a quick look in her direction, trying to put as much support and sympathy into it as he could, but she was staring at Jack like she'd never seen him before. Daniel darted Jack a glance and saw his mask slip just for a second, the way it had after he'd told Daniel to shut up on Euronda; that bitter grimace as he wished he could take back what he'd said. There was the briefest flicker of an apologetic look in Sam's direction but then Jack was turning to Hammond, saying more quietly, "That's my recommendation, sir. You send Daniel and I or you don't send anyone at all."

Jacob said dryly, "You know, Jack, you could be overestimating my fondness for you."

Jack flashed him a brief glance in return. "Oh, I'm using Daniel as a human shield here, Jacob. Everyone loves him."

Daniel couldn't bear to see the expression on Sam's face and spoke to Jack tersely. "Selmac wouldn't sacrifice anyone in the SGC and you know that as well as I do." 

"Do I?" Jack didn't look at him. "I think what I know is that the Tok'ra were willing to blow us up on Netu, and have experimented on people from this facility twice while trying out their new toys. I'm hoping they'd draw the line at killing you and me but I'm not confident enough I'm prepared to risk an entire SG team." He looked back at Hammond. "Permission to gear up, general?"

Hammond nodded. "We'll send a MALP through now." His gaze was gentler as it rested on Daniel. "You and Doctor Jackson get ready to leave in half an hour."

Jack inclined his head. "Yes, sir." He walked from the room and didn't look back at either Sam or Daniel. Darting a sympathetic look at Sam, Daniel also got to his feet and made to follow him.

Jacob said quietly, "Daniel, as far as I know there is nothing to hurt you on the other side of that gate. I give you my word."

"I know that." Daniel did glance across at him then. "Jack knows it too."

As Daniel closed the door he heard General Hammond say, "Jacob, if I didn't trust you I wouldn't be letting Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson go."

He didn't wait to hear Jacob ask why if that was the case he hadn't agreed to send a different SG team. Daniel had a sneaking suspicion there was just no answer to that.

***

O'Neill tried to crick his neck back into place as he waited for the chevrons to engage. So far it hadn't been one of his better days, he had to admit. He'd threatened to hit Daniel then insulted Carter's father right in front of her. She was now looking at him like she didn't like him very much. He'd also probably pissed off both Jacob and Selmac. Teal'c hadn't looked particularly thrilled with him either. Neither had General Hammond. Apart from that he was being Mister How To Win Friends and Influence People all the way.

He looked at the returned MALP without liking. It had shown a big empty chamber with a smaller chamber beyond. There had been no weaponry and certainly no exciting alien disintegrator beam. When the MALP had rolled its way into the smaller chamber the mirror had been hard to miss and he really hoped he and Daniel didn't give themselves hernias trying to lift that thing. He was starting to think his insistence on not sending another SG team had as much to do with his unwillingness to be alone with his thoughts as it did with trying to protect Ferretti and his people. Perhaps he was just so afraid of having nothing to do and so maybe having to think that he had manufactured a trust problem with the Tok'ra where one didn't exist. His judgment seemed so screwed up recently he wouldn't have put anything past himself. He'd heard one of the nurses murmuring to Fraiser the other day that Colonel O'Neill seemed to have the first documented case of male PMS, and it had taken all his self-control not to throw something at her. 

As Daniel appeared, pulling on his vest and with one bootlace trailing, O'Neill felt his irritation crank itself up another notch. _How_ many missions had they been on now? Why did Daniel always leave it to the last minute to get himself geared up? "Ready to go?" he said shortly.

"No." Daniel retorted. "I'm actually sunning myself on a beach in Honolulu. That would be why I'm standing here with you waiting for the wormhole to engage."

"Your bootlace is undone."

"So is your fly."

O'Neill automatically checked his fly before he could stop himself then looked up at Daniel with something close to murder in his heart. The face Daniel made at him didn't improve his temper one little bit. "Do up your damned bootlace!" O'Neill snapped.

"You know, you are turning into such a miserable son-of-a-bitch, Jack." Daniel spoke conversationally as he knelt and knotted his lace. "I've met System Lords who are better company than you are right now."

"Well, four years of babysitting a hundred and a seventy pounds of deadweight can do that to a guy, Daniel."

He knew he'd gone too far before he'd even finished the sentence, but he made himself look anyway, the way he made himself look at traffic accidents when he drove past them. Daniel had jerked his head up and was just staring at him now, mouth open, eyes big blue and full of hurt disbelief. If he'd just reached out and slapped Daniel across the face he couldn't have looked more shocked.

"Chevron seven engaged."

They didn't even look at it as the blue light billowed out at them before settling back into the glassy pool of the event horizon. They were locked into their own frozen moment.

O'Neill opened his mouth to apologize and then realized this was probably not something you could apologize for. This was something you simply didn't say. Saying it made it sound like you'd been thinking it. And the really stupid thing was he _hadn't_ thought it, not ever. Other SG leaders had murmured it in the past, before they'd got to know just how damned special Daniel was; but he never had thought it more than one day into their first mission. But he would never be able to convince Daniel of that now. He swallowed hard. "Daniel, I'm – "

Daniel's face was white and set as he marched past him without a word.

"Shit." O'Neill put a hand up to his head.

General Hammond's voice came through from the control room. "Colonel O'Neill is there a problem?"

"No, sir." He collected himself and headed after Daniel. "No problem." _I've turned into a miserable self-pitying bastard who my team are finding it increasingly hard to either like or respect, and I've just insulted my best friend so completely that even he is not going to be able to forgive me. Apart from that everything is just peachy._

As he stepped into the event horizon after Daniel, O'Neill wondered if he was ever going to be able to make this right.

 

Daniel decided the only way to get through this was not to think about what Jack had just said to him. He had to bear in mind that Jack wasn't acting like Jack at the moment and was lashing out at everyone. He would never have insulted Jacob like that if he'd been himself. The Jack O'Neill he knew was a good-humored reasonable man who – if not exactly 'tactful' – did usually make at least some effort not to actually wipe his feet on people he cared about. The Jack O'Neill who'd just said – that – to him in the 'gateroom was not the one he knew. Sooner or later the one he knew was going to come back. This guy was a stranger and it didn't matter what a stranger said to him. Daniel wondered why, when his logic was so impeccable, it was still taking all the self-control he had not to sit down on the floor and start crying. Jack withdrawing from him had been hard enough to cope with; Jack positively driving him away was almost unbearable.

He heard the wormhole disengage behind him followed by Jack saying tentatively, "Daniel…?"

Daniel swallowed hard before saying briskly: "The chamber with the mirror on it is over here." Not looking around so he wouldn't have to see Jack's remorse or lack of it, he pointed his flashlight determinedly at the doorway. He thought there were glyphs at the far end of the room and at any other time he would have been down there trying to video them but he was at the stage when he couldn't bear the thought of one more petty argument with Jack. There was a definite irony there. The last planet they'd been on he'd made such an impassioned speech about the evils of tyranny he'd managed to get a tyrant to change his point of view. But he wouldn't go and look at what could be important information in the battle against the Goa'uld because if he did, Jack might lose his temper again and say something else that would hurt Daniel's feelings. Well, that was impressive.

"Daniel, I didn't mean – "

"Here it is." Daniel said it loudly, deliberately drowning him out. _Don't say you're sorry and don't ask me to forgive you. You saying you're sorry isn't going to cut it this time and, no, I don't forgive you. Right now I'm not sure I'm ever going to forgive you._ _I'm fed up with you taking everything out on me. Actually, Jack, I'm just plain and simple fed up with you._

__As he stepped through the doorway into the smaller chamber, he saw the mirror. It was even larger than the one on 323 and it dominated the room; a beautiful object in its own right as well as a portal to literally infinite possibilities. For the first time Daniel thought about just quitting this dimension and not coming back. He'd been dead in the last two alternate universes they'd visited so if that was a common pattern in other dimensions he wouldn't have to worry about entropic cascade failure. Of course he might want to worry about why so many Daniel Jacksons seemed to end up dead at such a relatively young age but that was a different problem.

There were a lot of reasons why he'd stayed on at the SGC after Sha're's death and not all of them had to do with Jack. He did still love this job, after all. Did still want to defeat the Goa'uld, and Apophis in particular. Did want to find Sha're's child again and know that he was safe. Did still want to explore other worlds and see how those transplanted civilizations had evolved. But he had also stayed because he'd thought he'd found a home here, a place where people cared about him, respected him, appreciated him. What Jack had said to him in the 'gateroom had made him realize that it didn't matter if everyone else in the SGC respected him and cared about him, if Jack didn't, it all seemed pretty meaningless. 

It had taken him a long time to realize he had Jack's respect; that the man did rate his opinion as well as caring what became of him. He'd been worried about forfeiting that by some act of stupidity. To have lost it because of something he'd done would have left him devastated. But to lose Jack's respect for no reason, just because Jack had arbitrarily decided Daniel was no longer worthy of it; that made him angry as well as miserable. As first an orphan and then a fostered child he'd grown used to small injustices. His life had been full of them. He hadn't bitched about it, he'd just put up with it. He'd still been reeling from the major injustice of his parents having been taken from him after all. He hadn't bitched about his wife being turned into a Goa'uld either. Or Teal'c having to kill her to save his life. But Jack being unjust to him for no reason was not something he felt required to put up with.

Daniel wondered if the size of the mirror was significant in some way. Did it mean more dimensions to visit? More chances of finding one where he could be happy? Perhaps in some of those Sha're was still alive. His parents were still alive. Apophis was really dead. And Jack didn't treat him like something he was trying to scrape off the bottom of his shoe. He began to look for the remote. There were a few objects scattered across long stone table but none of them resembled the control device he'd found on 323. 

More to himself than Jack he murmured, "That's odd. It doesn't have a remote. I wonder if it was left switched on like the one on…?"

"Danny?"

The nickname shocked him; it was so long since he'd heard it. He jerked his head round in surprise and saw Jack standing in the doorway behind him, utter desolation on his face. Jack held out his hands in a gesture of helpless apology. "I'm sorry."

_It was rude and short-sighted and I'm sorry...  
_  
Daniel remembered Euronda and almost the same words spoken, the same look on Jack's face as now. For a second he almost weakened but this was the third time Jack had done something terrible to him in a matter of months. He'd told him their friendship was meaningless; then he'd told him to shut up in front of everyone; now he'd told him he was excess baggage Jack had been dragging around the universe for the past four years. Sometimes sorry wasn't enough.

"So am I," Daniel said tautly. He turned to look at the mirror again.

He'd barely even focused on it before Jack was lunging, throwing himself across the room to grab Daniel's arm and pull him away from the mirror before he could even think about touching it. "Don't." Jack's fingers dug into him painfully, his brown eyes apparently intent on hypnotizing him into obedience. "You're not a quitter. Don't let some ungrateful bastard who needs his ass kicked turn you into one."

Daniel pulled loose from his grip. "I wasn't going to – do whatever you thought I was going to do."

"You thought about it."

He met Jack's gaze unflinchingly. "I've thought about punching you in the nose but I haven't done that either."

"None of this has anything to do with you. It's nothing you've done wrong."

Daniel hated both of them because that made him feel so much better. He remembered his grandfather saying 'It wasn't your fault' and felt a spike of fury with himself for being the kind of person others had to reassure about his own blamelessness when they wronged him. He pushed Jack away. "I know, damnit!"

"It's me. It's just me. I'm having some problems with who I am and what I do. This is nothing to do with you."

"Don't keep saying that." Daniel backed up towards the mirror. "I don't care about your problems and I don't need reassurance this isn't my fault. I need reassurance you're going to stop acting like someone I don't know and can't trust. And if you can't give me that reassurance consider this an official request for a transfer."

Jack looked at him sadly. "Please, Daniel. Don't run out on me just because I deserve it."

Daniel almost hated Jack for making him feel so lousy. How could Jack still matter so much to him when the guy had been acting like a shit for so long now? He said tersely, "Why not? You'd still have Teal'c and Sam. And they're not deadweight you'd have to drag around with you. And I think for future missions I'd really prefer to have a CO who doesn't try to blow me up just because I disagree with him."

And now they'd both said something unjust and unforgivable. Daniel watched the shock and disbelief flare in Jack's eyes and wondered if that was how he'd looked in the 'gateroom. He wondered if Jack had felt as sick inside about putting that look on his face as he did right now for putting that look on Jack's. The small part of him that wasn't reeling from the shock of how deeply he'd wounded his best friend by throwing one of his worst experiences in his face, could observe the scene dispassionately. That must be why that voice in his head was saying with such quiet surprise: 'So this is the end then.' All those years. All those missions. All the strength and comfort they'd given and received from one another. And it was going to end like this: with something so ludicrously like a lover's tiff he was embarrassed for both of them.

They were still gazing at one another over the still-smoking wreckage of their friendship when another voice cut through the silence.

"Stay still."

It was automatic to turn around and see who was talking to them. Daniel's eyes widened in disbelief: "Teal'c?"

For a second he thought their teammate must have been worried about their recent estrangement and have followed them through to try to make them patch things up. Teal'c hated them arguing and could be even sterner about it than Jack was about 'reckless' behavior. Except why would he be wearing his serpent guard uniform –?

A strong hand shot out and fastened around his throat. He was yanked back against Teal'c's armored body, head pulled back at an unnatural angle while the Jaffa examined his face expressionlessly. Daniel gazed up at this other Teal'c in shock. There was nothing but cool indifference in this Jaffa's dark eyes, and the fingers around his throat were seriously limiting his oxygen. His uniform was fingered, his insignia checked, then the grip around his throat tightened even more. "You are a new variation," Teal'c said coolly. "You will repay questioning."

"Let him go." Jack sounded like his teeth were gritted.

The Jaffa glanced across at him as though he was of no importance. "If you fire, you will strike your companion. You are of no interest to me. You may return through the chaapa'ai."

"Let Daniel go!"

Teal'c glanced back at Jack with lazy contempt and then reached back to touch the mirror. As the blue light washed over him, the last thing Daniel heard was Jack shouting 'No!"

***

O'Neill threw himself into the blue vortex of the wormhole, and even though it disintegrated him in milliseconds it still wasn't fast enough, was nothing like fast enough. As he ran down the ramp of the SCG he was already yelling, "Get a rescue team in here!"

"Colonel?" He turned to find Hammond, Jacob, Carter and Teal'c still in the 'gateroom. With a sense of shock, O'Neill looked at his watch. He and Daniel had been on that planet for barely twelve minutes. Hammond's voice betrayed his concern. "Where's Doctor Jackson?"

"Teal'c took him." Seeing the Jaffa's expression, O'Neill impatiently amended, "Another Teal'c, one from a different dimension." He looked back at his watch. "He must have been waiting for us. He didn't want me, just Daniel. I tried touching the mirror but nothing happened."

"What about the control device?" That was Carter and he was relieved to see she was thinking her way through her shock not just reeling from it the way everyone else seemed to be.

"It wasn't there. I think the other Teal'c must have it." 

He could practically see the cogs in her brain working. "He must have taken the remote through with him the same way Doctor Carter and Major Kawalsky did when they came here."

He was aware of Hammond issuing orders, telling SG-2 and SG-3 to gear up for a search and rescue now, but it seemed to be happening a long way off. O'Neill put a hand up to his head, remembering that moment, the Jaffa giving him a last glance of contempt with Daniel limp in his arms then reaching across to switch off the mirror. He looked around at the others. "There has to be a way to get that damned thing working without the remote. To find Daniel."

The worried glance Teal'c and Carter exchanged told him this wasn't going to be easy. He really didn't want to hear that right now. 

Teal'c said, "If the mirror in our dimension was still switched on, O'Neill, you would have been transported to where Daniel Jackson was taken. The version of myself who took Daniel Jackson clearly has control not only of the mirror in his own dimension but of the one in ours."

Carter nodded. "Teal'c's right, sir. He must have both control devices. The second he was back in his own dimension he must have switched off the mirror in our dimension. Which is good in some ways as it means we can pick it up and move it without being sent to a different universe but it's going to be difficult learning how to operate it without a remote. And the – channel will have changed when the mirror was switched off. Did you see anything that would help us fix that dimension?"

O'Neill shrugged helplessly. "A big chamber with stuff on the walls. I only saw it for a second. Look, can we talk about this later? We need to go and get that damned mirror and bring it back here."

"Not here, Colonel." Hammond sounded regretful but determined. "I'm sorry, but as Teal'c and Major Carter have pointed out, we have to assume it can be activated by Jaffa from a different dimension. We would effectively be giving them a way into our world. We simply don't have the safety precautions in place to make that something I can agree to."

"But he took Daniel!"

There was no disguising the unhappiness in Hammond's eyes. "I know that, Colonel. But I still can't authorize you bringing that mirror here. You have my permission to take it somewhere else and to try to get it to work again, but you can't bring it here."

"Sir, the general's right." Carter seemed to know he was going to start yelling and was quick to head him off. "We'll take it to Voresh. Teal'c and I can – "

"No." He'd been in such a state of panic about Daniel it had been difficult to think, but now his brain kicked back into gear. "Not the Tok'ra."

"Why not?" Jacob put in quietly.

O'Neill met his gaze. "Because the Tok'ra's priorities are not the same as mine. If we give you that mirror you're going to be using it to try to find a way to defeat the Goa'uld. Looking for Daniel is not going to be uppermost in your thoughts."

"Tollana then." Teal'c said it quietly.

Carter nodded. "Good idea."

O'Neill tried to collect his thoughts, concentrate, damnit he had to concentrate. "Okay, general, can I have your permission to send Carter, and Teal'c to Tollana, to ask for their help?" As the man nodded his assent, he turned to Carter. "Ask if we can bring the mirror through to them. Tell them we're not interested in using it as a weapon and they can confiscate the damned thing the second we've got Daniel back." 

As Hammond gave the order to the technician to start dialing Tollana, O'Neill looked at Jacob. " I don't think there is a Goa'uld killing device on that planet at all. The whole thing is just a big trap. Those Tok'ra were grabbed for questioning and are probably dead by now. Daniel certainly wasn't the first guy that Teal'c had kidnapped."

Jacob nodded. "An Apophis from a different dimension is clearly thinking bigger than the one we know. He must be trying to get information on how he's been defeated in other dimensions to try to stop that happening in his own and so is kidnapping representatives of his enemies from alternate universes. I hate it when a Goa'uld starts thinking laterally."

"That other Teal'c said Daniel was a 'new variation'." O'Neill closed his eyes as he remembered the way the first prime had so casually taken possession of Daniel. As if he was his property now. His to do with as he liked. "He seemed to be the first Daniel he'd come across. I don't know why he wasn't interested in me." He stared at the chevrons. "Can't they dial that thing any faster?"

"Maybe he already has one of you, sir."

As he looked at her in non comprehension, Carter grimaced. "Entropic cascade theory would mean they could only hold one representative of each person in their dimension at any given time. If the Teal'c you described had already captured a Jack O'Neill from another universe he wouldn't then be able to – "

"Aren't you gone yet?" O'Neill demanded.

"We're on our way, sir." Carter gave him a look of compassion but he didn't want her compassion right now. He wanted her out there making that damned mirror work. Using those brains to get Daniel back while he was still in one piece.

The wormhole whooshed and then settled back into the rippling blue light. Carter and Teal'c were already heading up the ramp as SG-2 and SG-3 came into the 'gateroom at a run. O'Neill turned back to Hammond. "Sir, with your permission I'd like to leave now. SG-2 can help me carry the mirror through to Tollana."

Out of the corner of his eye O'Neill glimpsed Teal'c stepping through after Carter. Hammond also looked across at the Stargate. "Colonel, Teal'c and Major Carter won't have been able to explain the situation to Counselor Trevell, never mind obtained her permission to – "

"I don't care." O'Neill told him. "They owe us. If I can't bring it here I'm taking it there. They might bitch about it, but they'll still help us."

Jacob said, "He's right, George. They won't refuse to help in a situation like this, and SG-1 did save their entire planet. Can I have your permission to tag along?" As O'Neill darted him a look, he put his hand on his shoulder. "Look, Jack, the Tok'ra are not the enemy here. This is going to be a Tollan project but it sounds like we may have lost three operatives through that mirror so we'd like to offer any assistance you and the Tollans can use, okay?"

O'Neill shrugged. "That's okay with me."

"And on a personal note, I'd like to help get Daniel back. So, once you've headed off I'd like to go back to Voresh, get some help from the Tok'ra and meet you on Tollana."

"Dial up the planet Colonel O'Neill just came from." Hammond gave the order over his shoulder and then turned back to the other two. "Jack, I'm going to cut you a lot of slack on this one, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't alienate too many of our allies in the process of recovering Doctor Jackson."

"Understood, sir."

"Jacob, I am designating this a joint initiative between the SGC and the Tollan – presuming you and Colonel O'Neill are correct in your assumptions and the Tollan are willing to assist us in this matter – however I would also be grateful for any help the Tok'ra can give us."

Jacob nodded. "I read you." He reached out and patted O'Neill on the shoulder. "We'll get him back. And if they took him for questioning that means they need him alive."

O'Neill wondered how you got a face to smile because his seemed to have forgotten the motions. "Where there's life, there's hope, right?"

"Daniel's good in survival situations," Jacob reminded him. "Everyone loves him, remember? And we know better than anyone that Teal'c is a good man at heart. Daniel might be able to get through to him."

O'Neill nodded, but when he closed his eyes he saw that other Teal'c with those cold dead eyes, tilting Daniel's head up to examine his face dispassionately. He'd seen not a flicker of compassion in that Teal'c's face, but he was very much afraid he might have seen the barest glimmer of lust. And if that was the case he thought this might be one cultural interaction Daniel had no experience in dealing with.

"What's going on, Colonel?" He turned to see Ferretti geared up and ready to go.

O'Neill drew himself up straighter as the sixth chevron engaged. "I'll tell you on the way." Mentally he was telling himself that they _were_ going to get Daniel back before anything nasty happened to him. He wasn't even going to consider any other possibility.

***

"Look, can we talk about this…?"

Daniel winced as he was slammed down onto something that bore an unnerving resemblance to a dentist's chair. He had been told several times by different people that he talked too much. He'd been told it fondly, indulgently, tetchily, and with real menace, so he presumed it was probably true. However, what none of these people ever took into account was that talking was his only defense mechanism. Others might have weapons or right hooks at their disposal, but all he had was his ability to communicate.

"In the dimension I come from you actually turned against Apophis to help us. I know you're really a good man at heart and – "

The hand around his throat choked the end of his sentence into a splutter. Teal'c gazed into his eyes and he could see nothing of the man he knew in that expression. He saw intelligence, certainly, but it was of the cold, calculating kind; and he had certainly never seen Teal'c look at him in that way before. Cats looked at mice the way this Teal'c was looking at him. A finger was stroked contemptuously down the side of his face and Daniel flinched from it in surprise. 

"You will be silent and obedient."

Daniel moistened his lips. "Well, I wouldn't say those were two of my defining characteristics but – " The backhand took him completely by surprise. He gasped with the shock of it as pain thrummed through his face, the sound of that slap still ringing through the silence, then stared at the Jaffa with his mouth open.

Teal'c ran his finger across Daniel's bottom lip and then held it out so Daniel could see the blood. "Silent and obedient."

"But – " 

Daniel cried out as he was backhanded again, even harder this time. He opened his mouth to say that okay he got the message, he wouldn't – then closed it again. He was starting to feel a little panicked now. The only way he could get through to this Teal'c was by talking. If he wasn't allowed to talk, then – he was in serious trouble. 

He looked around at his surroundings. There was the mirror but its surface was blank. It was obviously switched off from this end. The chamber was large and imposing and there were hieroglyphs all over the walls. As he tried to focus on them, Teal'c reached forward and removed his glasses. Daniel opened his mouth to protest but then closed it again as the Jaffa shot him a warning look. He thought this Teal'c might just crumble them in his hand in front of him as proof of his superior strength but he actually found the way they were handed to another Jaffa to be labeled slightly more chilling. Daniel remembered what this Teal'c had said about him being a 'new variation'. Something to extract the information from and them presumably either kill or toss back through the mirror.

"Remove your jacket."

"Why?" The word was out before he could stop it.

This time Teal'c grabbed him by the hair and slammed him back down onto the chair, kneeling over him in a way that Daniel would definitely have categorized as intruding on his personal space. As those fingers tightened in his hair and he smelled sweat and something else, Daniel had a sudden awareness of Teal'c as someone…male. He'd never really thought about that before. Jack was Jack. Teal'c was Teal'c. Sam was Sam. He was aware, yes, that two of his teammates were male and one was female, that sometimes technicians or aliens got serious crushes on Sam and this could be useful or not as circumstances dictated. But he didn't go around thinking of them as people with genders very often; they were just – them. But now he was very aware that this Teal'c was very male indeed; that he smelled of male sweat; had the kind of strength only very strong men had; that his groin was on Daniel's eyelevel and was at least semi-aroused. Not for the first time Daniel decided that his own dimension was a lot nicer than all the others and he would really like to get back to it as soon as possible. He liked his Teal'cs calm, comforting, and on Daniel's side. Definitely _not_ as a scary bully with a hard-on. He'd had a bellyful of those at college.

He spoke rapidly. "I'm sorry but I work with you every day. It's difficult for me to see you as an enemy. In my dimension we're friends."

"Friends?" This Teal'c seemed positively amused by that. He pulled Daniel's head back and examined his face again, turning it from side to side. Then he asked Daniel something in the coarsest form of Goa'uld that silenced Daniel more effectively than another backhand.

After he'd gasped for the breath that question had shocked out of him, Daniel said, "Um – no. He doesn't. Ever."

"Does O'Neill?"

Daniel gaped at him. "No!"

Teal'c abruptly released him, letting Daniel's head smack against the chair. "Then you must have other uses. You will tell me what they are."

Daniel wondered if he'd just made a serious miscalculation. Perhaps he should have answered 'yes' to that question. As in 'Yeahsureyoubetcha. That's my only function on the Stargate program so you needn't bother asking me about anything else because Teal'c and Jack always tell me not to bother my pretty little head with that technical stuff and just get my butt back on the bed…' Then he looked at the Jaffa again and realized that if he'd answered 'Yes' this Teal'c would have decided he wasn't worth keeping alive and would probably have killed him. After sampling the goods he would then believe Jack and Teal'c were getting. Yes, after due consideration, he thought he'd played this one right after all. There were worse things than being tortured for information.

"Take off your jacket."

Daniel did so albeit reluctantly and while shooting this AU Teal'c a lot of wary glances. He wondered what the hell he was supposed to do if that order was followed by 'Now take off the rest of your clothes'. Obey, he supposed. The only way back from here was through that mirror and quite apart from the fact he wasn't sure how to switch it on, there were several Jaffa and a Teal'c between him and it so escape wasn't an option. And if he said no, this Teal'c seemed very willing to rip his clothes off anyway, and the struggle would not only get Daniel seriously slapped around but might turn on this clearly very easily-arousable Teal'c. Which might not be the best idea he'd ever had. Actually Teal'c seemed more interested in the jacket he'd taken off than the body it had been removed from. Which was about the best news he'd had all day.

As Teal'c held up his jacket to the light to examine it better and then tossed it to another Jaffa, Daniel said, "You're trying to assess our level of development, aren't you? That's why you need my glasses? And an example of my clothing? And my weapons, of course. You're trying to build up some kind of – database on enemies of Apophis from different dimensions – "

As Teal'c raised his hand, Daniel ducked, hunching up his shoulders. "Or I could be quiet," he said meekly.

The other Teal'c gave him a glance of contempt. "Take off your boots."

This time Daniel decided he would do what he was told _before_ he got hit. Silent and obedient, right? Perhaps he could do that after all.

***

O'Neill had never felt so useless. Right now he really needed to be _doing_ something. He wanted to be out there fighting to get Daniel back from that son-of-a-bitch. Instead he was stuck in a laboratory on Tollana watching bubbles rise and fall in some pillar that made him think of lava lamps he'd gazed at through the smoke of countless joints at parties in the seventies. They'd sent SG-2 home within the first hour. There was nothing for them to do and SG-8 was late for their call in to the SGC. He almost envied Ferretti having something to do. Anything had to be better than this waiting around.

The Tollan had been predictably uptight about him bringing the quantum mirror through without so much as a by-your-leave, but after registering a token protest and pretty much threatening to send a note home about him to General Hammond, they had then been as predictably helpful. 

He'd never had a lot of time for the Tollan. They way they were so damned superior usually made him want to toss a chair at them, but his usual hostility couldn't sustain itself when Narim was being so helpful. Narim had first argued passionately for all the reasons why the Tollan should be helping them to a pissed off Counselor Trevell, and then sat down in front of that quantum mirror and gone all out to try to get Daniel back alive. That was when O'Neill had found himself really liking the guy despite everything. 

At the moment Narim and Carter were trying to hotwire the mirror without a remote, talking gobbledegook at each other and scribbling incomprehensible calculations on little bits of paper like schoolchildren cramming for a science exam.

"We know that the mirrors lose their previous 'channel' for want of a better word, when they're switched off, so without a remote…"

"Yes, Samantha, we are aware of this as well, although we have not actually had an opportunity to study…"

"There has to be a way to – backwards engineer a control device for this. All we need to do is find a way to switch it on and find the last dimension it was linked to…"

O'Neill knew he had to sit this one out, but it was all he could do not to yell at them to just solve it! Now! He went and sat down next to Teal'c. The Jaffa was looking about as happy as he felt. O'Neill said, "It's not your fault."

Teal'c said, "I do not take responsibility for every action committed by my counterparts from different dimensions, O'Neill."

O'Neill darted him a sideways look and decided that you could have fooled him. "Glad to hear it, because that guy is nothing to do with you. I know that. You know that. Daniel knows that."

When he saw Teal'c grimace, he realized he'd guessed right. "Daniel knows that better than anyone, Teal'c."

"Daniel Jackson will attempt to reason with this other version of myself because he has found me to be a reasonable man…" Teal'c left the sentence unfinished.

O'Neill grimaced. "And you think that equation works both ways."

"Does it not?"

"No, it doesn't. Whatever that Teal'c is doing to Daniel right now isn't anything to do with you. It doesn't mean you're capable of it. And Daniel knows that."

Teal'c looked him in the eye. "What do you think he is doing to Daniel Jackson right now, O'Neill?"

O'Neill turned his head away, trying to keep his tone light. "Well, I'm not kidding myself Daniel is enjoying it too much, but it still has nothing to do with you."

"I know." Teal'c got to his feet and moved away. O'Neill watched the tall Jaffa walk over to the quantum mirror, gazing at it fixedly as though he could will it do spring into life. In a few minutes O'Neill knew he would have to do the same thing. They didn't understand how it worked, had no idea how to make it do what they needed it to do, but neither of them could keep away from it for any length of time because it was their only way to find Daniel.

"Here." He looked up to find Narim offering him a glass of something purple and hot. "This drink is supposed to relieve tension. And I think we would all benefit from some refreshment."

O'Neill nodded his thanks and accepted it. The first sip was a pleasant surprise. He'd been expecting something like cranberry juice whereas this was much more like single malt. 

"Your friend is a most impressive ally." Narim looked at Teal'c. "Our world owes him much. His courage, determination and intelligence were all critical in saving us from the Goa'uld."

"But you wouldn't want him as an enemy. No." O'Neill finished his drink. "Neither would I." 

Narim nodded to him and went back to the table where Carter was still bending her head over her calculations. The purple liquid was cooling by her elbow, already forgotten. 

O'Neill had another flashback to that other Teal'c and flinched inwardly. _Daniel, just do what he says. Don't you remember what Teal'c said the last time we had trouble with mirrors? Ours is the only dimension that matters. You can tell those guys anything you like because as long as there isn't a mirror into our universe there's no way they can ever use it against us._ But inside he knew Daniel wasn't going to be thinking like that. In Daniel's position he wouldn't be thinking like that either. That was the problem with alternate universes; logically you might know the others were all shadow worlds with no real substance, but to the people who lived in them, the people you _knew_ who lived in them, they felt pretty damned real.

***

Daniel flinched as the other Teal'c abruptly grabbed him by the wrists and forced them down behind his head. The movement brought their faces very close together, Teal'c leaning across his body, gaze locked onto Daniel's gaze, a hot gust of Teal'c's breath warming Daniel's mouth. Daniel swallowed hard. Teal'c slowly pushed his left wrist up higher and Daniel twisted his head round to see a leather strap tightened across it. Teal'c seemed to enjoy pulling it unnecessarily tight. Even though Daniel didn't offer any resistance – what would be the point? – Teal'c still slammed his right wrist down extra hard before tightening the strap around it. Daniel decided this was now looking less like a dentist's chair and more and more like an out and out torturer's chair. He was still uncomfortably aware of how much bigger and stronger than him Teal'c was. He could see the man's muscles rippling under his skin, could smell the musty scent of his arousal; that hard powerful body barely an inch above his as Teal'c continued to loom over him.

He had already noticed the serpent guard uniform was different here. There was the same wide metal chest and shoulder protection, but the torso and arms were left bare, so were the legs. More importantly, so was the 'womb' area. He presumed it was a bravado thing, like going into battle naked. Proof that the Apophis of this dimension was so all powerful his Jaffa didn't need to armor themselves against their enemies. He wondered if leaving the vulnerable pouch exposed was the ultimate act of machismo, or just an oversight because in this dimension the larval Goa'uld was considered too holy to threaten so it had never occurred to Apophis or his Jaffa that anyone would. Although he was filing a possible weakness away for future reference, at the moment Daniel was much more concerned with how much of Teal'c's bare flesh was on display. Not to mention the fact there was nothing stopping that symbiote wriggling its way inside him if it should get a hankering for a change of address.

When Teal'c's hands began to trace a line down his arms, Daniel started violently. He tried not to shiver as Teal'c continued to stroke his fingers down his arms to his shoulders then down across Daniel's chest. The black material of his t-shirt felt as if it was much too thin a barrier between himself and the Jaffa's hands but he still jolted with the shock of it when Teal'c abruptly tugged up his t-shirt and ran warm but cruel fingers up across his ribs. Daniel flinched again as fingers probed at his appendix scar. "Is this your only battle scar?"

Daniel tried to remember any wounds he'd received after his last trip through the sarcophagus. There was one on his thigh but he certainly wasn't going to offer to show the Jaffa that. "It's not really a battle scar."

"What is it then?"

The urge to say 'I was savaged by a mountain lion in Sierra Leone but I managed to beat it off with my toothbrush' was almost overwhelming. Daniel counted to ten, told himself firmly that smart mouths too often turned into split lips, then said: "It's from a medical procedure. One of my internal organs malfunctioned." _Exploded like an overripe grapefruit to be more accurate._ "It was removed by a doctor under an anesthetic." _And yes, having a burst appendix was agony, but at least it got me out of having to go fishing with Jack._

"You cannot be a warrior."

Daniel moistened his lips. "Actually, I'm a doctor of archaeology. I study the past. How many SG teams have you…studied?"

"Speak only when you are spoken to."

Daniel grimaced, the effort of swallowing retorts almost choking him. When this Teal'c had managed to catch a few more Daniel Jacksons in his quantum mirror butterfly net he'd know that 'speaking only when spoken to' was something any Daniel Jackson found almost impossible to do.

Teal'c pulled down Daniel's t-shirt again, throwing it back across his abdomen contemptuously but Daniel wasn't going to quibble about the manner in which it was done. He held his breath as those powerful fingers continued their downward exploration. There was an endless moment when they hovered over his belt buckle and he closed his eyes. 

_Please, Teal'c, you really don't want to do this…you're a good man at heart…don't do this to me, please…_

Then the fingers were on his thighs, Teal'c was running his hands down his legs. There was a nasty smile hovering around Teal'c's mouth and he could feel the heat of those bruising fingers straight through his pants, but he didn't care; he was still buttoned up. This Teal'c clearly enjoyed scaring him. Well, fine, he was scared. He would look as scared and act as scared as the guy liked, just as long as he didn't actually have to find out a lot of things about Teal'c he really didn't want to know. 

The strong hands continued their journey down his legs, lingering over them in a way that Daniel knew was supposed to worry him. It did. Then Teal'c abruptly seized his bare ankles and jerked his legs open. Daniel flinched in anticipation while still gazing into those familiar and yet so unfamiliar dark eyes. That unpleasant smile got wider and the moment hung frozen between them; the fingers biting into his anklebones; Teal'c's eyes full of arrogance and amused contempt. Daniel tried to tell himself there wasn't any lust there despite the unmistakable burn in the Jaffa's gaze. Teal'c was just – threatening him. Getting off on the power he had over his Tau'ri captive who so clearly didn't want to get raped by six foot four of merciless first prime. Then leather was tightened around his ankles and he let out the breath he had been holding for so long.

Teal'c was strapping him down to a torture chair. Fine. Absolutely fine. The guy hadn't removed any of the clothing he would _have_ to remove if he was going to do anything…else to his prisoner. That was very good news. That was in fact the best news Daniel had been given all day.

Daniel was so weak with relief he barely registered the orders Teal'c was snapping out to the Jaffa. He did notice the way they jumped to it when the man spoke to them. This Teal'c definitely seemed the type who didn't take failure well. If – _when_ – he got back to his own dimension Daniel was going to get Dra'yac to teach him how to cook something Chulakian, then he was going to make Teal'c dinner and ask him to tell him every Jaffa joke there was. Then laugh at every one like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. 

"You will tell me about your dimension. You will tell me about your victories and your defeats in your blasphemous war against your God Apophis."

Daniel looked him in the eyes and said coolly, "No, I don't think so."

The backhand was so hard it felt as if his left cheekbone had exploded. For a few seconds the room definitely lurched and spun. There was a moment of white noise and hissing in his ears, and then he managed to fight his way back to consciousness. He gazed up at Teal'c; this stranger with his friend's face; and said quietly, "The Teal'c I know would never hit a man whose hands were tied. The Teal'c I know is a warrior of great honor and courage."

Teal'c grabbed a good handful of his hair and jerked his head up, putting his face very close to Daniel's as he breathed softly, "Would the Teal'c you know fuck you until you begged for mercy, slave?"

Daniel moistened his lips, tasting blood from an earlier blow. "That would be a 'no'."

Teal'c slammed Daniel's head against the chair as he released him. "I would."

"You know, I sensed that about you."

He could almost hear Jack hissing at him, _Daniel, shut the fuck up! You do not want to piss this guy off any more than you have already._ Daniel made an imaginary salute to this imaginary Jack. Message received and understood, Colonel O'Neill, sir. Definitely no mouthing off to big scary Jaffa from _this_ anthropologist. 

The other Jaffa were wheeling up some kind of big screen thing… Daniel's heart sank a little lower. Oh he knew what this was. He'd seen this before. In Hathor's mock-up of the SGC. But the spinning ball of lights Teal'c was carrying, that was something new. Teal'c released it and the ball floated in front of him, the lights flickering and glowing. He knew he should look away from it but it was hypnotic; colors dancing in front of him; swirling patterns which reminded him of the kaleidoscope his grandfather had given him when he was a child. His mother had told him he'd put himself in a trance one day with that thing. He was very afraid that day might just have arrived.

He was dimly aware of Teal'c advancing on him, then a sharp pain pierced his temple and he automatically tried to put up his hand to pull out the memory device. Leather tightened around his wrists, thwarting him easily. He was aware that Teal'c was smiling, leaning in close to adjust the dial on the memory device, turning it to maximum; but he couldn't drag his gaze away from the swirling ball of flashing lights. Images licked across the larger screen, confused and jumbled, but each one a small betrayal

When Teal'c said, "Tell me how you were recruited to the SGC…?" Daniel could feel the images of his last lecture spreading across that screen like water spilled across old parchment. His past an open book that even the enemy could read.

***

"How is it going, Colonel?"

O'Neill looked up to see Jacob offering him a tunafish sandwich. He blinked in surprise then took it. "Thanks."

"I stopped off at the SGC," Jacob explained. "Nothing against the Tollan or the Tok'ra, but their catering leaves a little to be desired. I figured as we were in for the long haul on this one we might as well have something good to eat." He put a flask down on the steps. "That's Daniel's coffee. For when we get him back."

O'Neill was very grateful for that 'when'. Not for the first time he was reminded that Jacob had commanded men in the field in his time and knew how to boost morale when it was slumping. O'Neill had been the one boosting other people for so long he was surprised to find how comforting it was to have it done to him. He took a bite of the sandwich, murmuring another 'Thanks' as he chewed. He was unexpectedly reminded of the way Daniel ate waffles like a little kid, taking too big a bite then having to chew around it, quite often talking with his mouth open as he did so: a characteristic he'd used to find kind of sweet and endearing and then lately had begun to find annoying. He'd recently begun to find almost everything Daniel did annoying; an irritation with himself that he'd had to project somewhere. Not for the first time he wondered why the hell Daniel had put up with him for as long as he had.

He almost told Jacob the truth then. Almost said 'Daniel thought about going even before that other Teal'c came and grabbed him. I saw the way he looked at that mirror and I know what he was thinking. He was thinking he wanted to get the hell away from me and maybe only another dimension would be far enough.'

When Jacob said, "Jack, I think you and I need to have a little talk," O'Neill gaped at him in surprise.

"I've been wanting to talk to you for a while." Jacob leaned back against the pillar that reminded O'Neill of a lava lamp. That was ominous. Jacob seemed to think this was going to take a while. "Last time I was at the SGC, General Hammond told me he wasn't too happy about the way SG-1 was functioning. He said you and Daniel didn't seem as close as you used to be and I have to say I thought the same thing. Have you had some kind of argument?"

"Not exactly."

"Are you angry with him?"

"No." O'Neill looked up in surprise. "Of course not. Daniel hasn't done anything wrong."

"So he hasn't done anything wrong but you've been freezing him out anyway?"

"I haven't been…" He broke off because what else had he been doing but that?

"Jack, I have known you for a couple of years now, and I know that the friendship you and Daniel had is nothing like any friendship I have ever had. To be honest, it's nothing like any other friendship I've ever encountered."

"What's that supposed to mean?" 

"I mean you were close."

"Yes."

"But the last visit I didn't see that closeness. I saw Daniel reacting to you the way he always has done but I didn't see you reacting back. I saw him left out in the cold while you ignored him. What did he do, Colonel?"

"I told you. Nothing."

"I asked Teal'c about it, he said your 'affection for Daniel Jackson remained undimmed'."

"He said right."

"He said that anyone who had 'observed your behavior when Daniel Jackson was in danger would be aware that your feelings for him were unchanged'."

O'Neill turned his head to look Jacob in the eye. "Well, he's in danger right now. Do you think Teal'c was speaking the truth?"

Jacob looked at him for a moment and then patted him on the shoulder. "I guess Teal'c was right. Jack, I don't know what's got that bug up your ass at the moment, but whatever it is, maybe you should be asking yourself if it's worth what it's costing you. And him. And SG-1. There's a whole war against the Goa'uld going on out there which I think might be just a little bit more important than whatever you are letting screw up your team right now."

Jacob sounded as if he had a lot more to say but Carter chose that moment to call across, "Dad, we could really do with Selmac's help over here."

Jacob sighed and got to his feet. "How about that? My own daughter has more respect for my symbiote's opinion than she does for mine." He nodded at O'Neill. "Think about what I've said, Jack."

"Oh Jeez…" O'Neill groaned and put a hand up to his head. His crappy behavior to Daniel was so obvious that even Jacob had noticed it? No wonder Daniel had thought about walking out on him. But as for thinking over what the cause of his bad temper was, he just didn't know, and if anyone else knew they weren't telling him.

Carter turned around at once, concern in her blue eyes. He wondered if anyone had gotten her a sandwich. She'd been wrestling with that mirror for hours now and when her mind was engaged by a problem, as with Daniel, food and drink too often went by the wayside. "Are you okay, Colonel?"

"I'm fine." He took off his cap, ran a hand through his hair, then put the cap back on again. "How are you doing with that thing?"

"We're getting there, sir." He heard and appreciated the determination in her voice.

"I know you are, Major." He nodded briskly, giving her the good CO impression as well as he could. It evidently satisfied her because she gave him a nod in return before turning back to the mirror. That was when he slumped back against the pillar, seeing that dead-eyed Teal'c in his mind's eye again. The one who'd taken possession of Daniel like it was his God-given right to kidnap anthropologists, while looking Daniel over like he was just another piece of meat. Mentally he was adding 'But not fast enough, Carter. You're not getting there anything like fast enough…'

***

_You have great mental strength, Daniel Jackson…  
_  
He remembered Teal'c telling him that. The Jaffa had been trying to teach him to meditate his way through his grief after Sha're's death. He'd been so frustrated by his own inability to escape from his misery, he'd kicked over one of Teal'c's candles and sent it rolling across the floor to spill spots of liquid wax; the flame's reflection leaving a dancing pattern of light and shadow against the wall. "I can't do this. I can't."

Teal'c had reached across to set the candle upright once more. His gaze had been hypnotic, quiet with conviction. "Yes, you can."

That was when Teal'c had told him he had great mental strength. Daniel had looked up at him and felt a smile tug at the corner of his mouth for the first time in days. "You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Teal'c?"

There had been no answering smile from Teal'c, only compassion in those dark eyes. "No, Daniel. I never would."

It gave him a strange little shiver of pleasure when Teal'c called him 'Daniel', perhaps because it happened so very rarely. It felt as good as if Teal'c had put his arms around him and hugged him close. Except not just him – Doctor Daniel Jackson, aged thirty-five – but little Daniel Jackson who had, since the death of his parents, been denied all the comforts of touch. Teal'c calling him 'Daniel' made that orphaned child feel so much better it almost hurt. He got the same feeling when Jack called him 'Danny'. He pretended not to like it but the fact was it always felt like a present, and it could warm him from his toes all the way to the top of his skull. He guessed anthropologists and linguists weren't the only people who understood the resonance of names. 

Now Daniel closed his eyes and concentrated. He had to think about _something_ but he didn't have to look at that ball of swirling lights and he didn't have to think of things Apophis might find useful. He could think about the Rosetta Stone. There it was. A homage to Ptolemy Epiphanes which had unlocked the key to hieroglyphic writing. He could remember his mother telling him the story of it. How he'd envied Champollion being born into a world which had such discoveries yet to be made. To think that at seven he had been afraid that by the time he grew up there might be no mysteries left for him to solve…

"Answer me! What happened after you traveled through the Stargate to the ship of your god Apophis?"

Standing in a corridor, running on panic, bravado and adrenalin; serpent guards approaching; kill or be killed; fire, Daniel! Fire now! Oh God the pain of that blast as it slammed into his shoulder. Hard to believe anything other than the kick of a mule could hit so hard. Death coming closer in the shape of that sparking staff weapon; gathering the last of his strength to fire again, then slumping back in time to see Jack arrive. He'd read the truth in Jack's eyes. Up until that moment he'd been trying to hope it wasn't as bad as it felt but the expression on Jack's face had told him the worst. That was the moment he'd known he was dead and this time even Jack couldn't save him…

No. Not that. Think about the Rosetta Stone again. Hieroglyphs. Demotic. Greek. What did he remember about demotic? That it was so named by Herodotus. The official government of the Ptolemies called it enchorial, from _enkhorios_ meaning native – 

Daniel was jolted back into the present by a hand in his hair slamming his head down against the back of the chair. "You will obey me." Teal'c's voice was harsh with anger and frustration. He clearly hadn't enjoyed Daniel's attempt to recite the first four chapters of The Book of Coming Forth By Day earlier either. Or his mental dissertation on the Kushites. Daniel had done one of his many college essays on Piankhi, the Kushite prince, who had been more Egyptian than the Egyptians, reviving rituals of worship that probably hadn't been carried out since the days of the Old Kingdom. Trying to remember the entire essay paragraph by paragraph had proven a very useful distraction but Teal'c had clearly not appreciated his efforts.

The way Teal'c leaned across him to undo the leather strap around his wrists seemed more than a little ominous. Daniel was once again made uncomfortably aware of the bigger man's strength and size. The first strap was jerked loose and then the second. Daniel darted a quick glance at his wrists and saw the fresh red marks overlaying the previous bruises. He'd clearly been strapped into this damned thing for quite a while. Time had a habit of getting away from you when your memories were being put through a blender. The leather restraints were jerked loose from his ankles as well. Daniel tried to tell himself this was a good sign. They had allowed him to rest in between sessions when he had been Hathor's prisoner, presumably because the mind was more open and vulnerable when the memory device was first inserted. After that the subject developed a little more resistance and was able to manage his or her thoughts. A trick which had to be relearned each time a new session began. So it made sense that Teal'c should be unstrapping him from the chair. It didn't necessarily mean something ominous. All the same, trying to get on this guy's good side might not be a bad idea round about now. 

Daniel winced as the memory device was pulled from his temple then moistened his lips before looking up at the angry Jaffa. He gave him his most winsome smile. "You know, I think we got off on the wrong foot. I'm sure that if you met me half way we could definitely become friends."

A hand was clasped to his throat again, jerking his head back at an unnatural angle. Teal'c brought his face very close to Daniel's, the pitiless dark eyes gazing into his with only disdainful dislike. "Is this friendly enough for you, Slave?" 

The tongue was forced into his mouth before he had time to react, invading and demanding. Shocked, he tried to spit it out but fingers pressed hard into each side of his jaw keeping his mouth open. The tongue explored his mouth with thrusting contempt, making him accept this intrusion, letting him know how futile his struggles were. What made it worse was that this was _Teal'c_. His assailant was wearing the face of someone he knew. Someone he trusted. Someone whom all his instincts had told him almost from their very first meeting would never hurt him or humiliate him like this. This son-of-a-bitch had no right to be living in Teal'c's body, borrowing Teal'c's face and voice, when he so obviously _wasn't_ Teal'c.

Rage flared inside him. Uncontrollable desire might have been different, albeit frightening, but this was just the other Teal'c's way of showing him how worthless he was; fit only to be fucked if nothing better came along. Teal'c was grinding his groin against Daniel's, not because he was genuinely finding Daniel arousing, just to signal how low down the food chain he thought him. Daniel tried to tear himself loose but Teal'c's body effortlessly forced him back down against the couch. He couldn't get up a knee to push the man off either. In desperation he remembered the vulnerability of that pouch and the symbiote within it. He closed his eyes then slammed his fist into Teal'c's pouch with all his might.

His fist hit something that wriggled and squealed and he snatched his hand away at once. The way the tongue was withdrawn from his mouth in the same instant the body weight lifted from his, told him that for once he'd managed to land a punch his enemy had actually felt. Daniel took one look at he fury on Teal'c's face as the Jaffa staggered backwards, clutching a hand to his abdomen, then threw himself off the couch and dived for the mirror. The other Jaffa seemed too stunned to intercept him and Daniel managed to get a hand onto the chill surface of the rim. Nothing happened. 

Daniel saw the two control devices lying by the mirror and snatched up the first one. Even as he was pressing the first colored panel, he was realizing there were two remotes here because there had been no remote back on that planet. Meaning Jack had no way of finding the dimension Daniel had been taken to without some means to change the 'channels.' This time no one else could come and rescue him. This time he had to get himself home. The next second the device was knocked from his fingers; a hand seized his hair and jerked his head back.

The last thing he saw was the mirror coming up to meet him as his face was slammed towards it with great force.

***

"Hey…?"

Daniel slowly groped his way back to consciousness. Before he was even properly awake he realized he was cold and he was hurting. Damn, he hated waking up to that. He remembered Teal'c…Not Teal'c. Or rather a different Teal'c. One he hadn't been able to get through to; a man as cruel and proud as the Goa'uld he served. Daniel had been dazed from that crack on the head, which had been good because while Teal'c had been pretty much beating the crap out of him he'd been sinking quite swiftly towards blissful unconsciousness. Passing out had never felt so good. 

He groaned aloud as his bruises woke up with him and light sliced straight through his head like a sword. He saw stone walls, iron bars, and someone bending over him.

"Hey? Sleeping Beauty? You okay?"

Daniel blinked, eyes watering as the dim light of the cell stung them. The face looking down at him was familiar yet out of place. But those brown eyes were immediately recognizable, as was that anxious expression. He felt hands on his shoulders gently easing him up. Daniel licked his lips. "Jack?"

He was propped against the wall of the cell, felt fingers against the side of his face gently holding his head up. A familiar voice murmured conversationally, "And just how do you know my name, Blue Eyes? You were unconscious when they threw you in here."

Daniel blinked again, the cell tilting then coming back into focus. Jack also came into focus. The man had a bruise across his right cheekbone, and a cut by his left eye. Jack had clearly been mouthing off to the enemy again – Daniel mentally 'tut-tutted'; he would have thought by now Jack would have learned not to do that – but Jack also looked subtly…different. Daniel frowned in confusion as he took in those little changes. "You grew your hair again?"

He saw the man lick his thumb and then press it gently to his forehead. "You are really out of things, aren't you, kiddo? That must have been one hell of a crack to the head. And you have _got_ to wonder about the mentality of a guy who'd mess around with a face like that. No appreciation for art, clearly." There was a pause and then the man sighed. "Are you hearing anything I'm saying here or are there just a lot of bells ringing in your head?"

"I hear you." Daniel sat up a little straighter, blinking at the man as he tried to get him to come into focus. "You are Jack, aren't you?"

The man pulled over a pail of water and dipped a rather grubby looking handkerchief into it. "I'm _a_ Jack. Not the one you know though, because I don't know you. Although judging by your uniform I'm thinking I should. Are you part of the Stargate program in your dimension?"

Daniel held out a hand which he noticed left a trail when he moved it. "I'm Doctor Daniel Jackson. I'm on SG-1."

A callused but warm hand clasped his in return. "Colonel Jack O'Neill, also of SG-1, but then you apparently already know that." The next moment the damp handkerchief was pressed very gently to his head.

Daniel winced. "Ow."

"Easy, Doc. You've got a nasty cut here. Did that big guy work you over?"

"His name is Teal'c. He's first prime of Apophis."

"Snakeboy I know, but I can't say I've ever been on first name terms with any of his goons." The damp handkerchief was applied to his cheekbone and then dabbed to his mouth. "How's the head? How many of me are you seeing right now?"

"Just the one."

"That's good. What about your ribs?"

Even though he'd only known this man for a matter of minutes, because he was _a_ Jack even if he wasn't _the_ Jack, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for Daniel to let the man pull up his t-shirt and take a look. This Jack was as competent and gentle as his own would have been; feeling over his ribcage carefully, responding when Daniel winced, examining his bruised skin carefully. He wasn't Jack though and that stopped him wanting to share that name with this man, even though he undoubtedly shared Jack's face. Daniel thought back to his first meeting with Jack; back to when the man had still been 'Colonel O'Neill'. It was a _long_ time since he'd thought of Jack as that, but it seemed appropriate to this man.

"Well, I'm seeing Jaffa boot marks here, so I'd say he probably kicked you when you were down, but I don't think you've busted any ribs. He seems to have given you the regular serpent guard slapping around but I don't think he's done any permanent damage." As Daniel shivered, Colonel O'Neill pulled down his t-shirt and gave him a look of concern. "Where's your jacket?"

"He took it."

"And your boots?"

"He took those too." Daniel darted a glance at the man's feet and saw he still had his boots. That didn't seem fair to him.

O'Neill took off his own jacket and put it around Daniel's shoulders. "There you go. If I'd known I was going to have company I would have saved you some of that gruel stuff they dish up here, but I went and ate all of mine. You sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine. Thank you." Daniel snaked his arms into the man's jacket and it felt strange to have the scent and warmth of Jack wrapped around him even though he was now in a different universe. Strange but oddly right as well. It was certainly comforting to have a Jack O'Neill on his side even if it wasn't the one he knew. He focused on O'Neill properly for the first time and took in the few differences between them. There weren't many. This Jack wasn't as gray as the one he knew, just a few strands of silver amongst the brown, and his hair was a little longer. He had a slightly more devil-may-care look about him as well. More like the Jack he'd known when he'd first joined SG-1. With a jolt Daniel wondered if it was true. Perhaps it _was_ his fault Jack had all those gray hairs.

O'Neill dipped the handkerchief back into the water and then squeezed it out. "So, you and me are both on SG-1 in your world, right?"

Daniel nodded. 

"Okay, let me guess who else is on the team in your dimension. Kawalsky?"

Daniel shook his head and then winced at the pain it caused. "Ow. No. Kawalsky's dead in my dimension. He was taken by a Goa'uld."

"Tough break. Are you his replacement?"

"No, Kawalsky had his own unit."

"Oh." O'Neill pressed the damp cloth to Daniel's forehead again. "I was just thinking if you _were_ his replacement I'd have to make sure I killed Kawalsky the second I got back to my dimension, and ordered up one of you instead."

Daniel blinked at him in confusion. "Isn't Kawalsky your friend in your dimension?"

"My best friend," the man assured him, still dabbing at his head. "But what can I say? You're cuter." His grin was infectious but Daniel was too dumbfounded to respond. As Daniel's jaw dropped, O'Neill shook his head. "Well, given the way you're staring at me like I just grew an extra head or something, I'm presuming the me in your dimension is a little slow on the uptake or only likes his bread buttered on the boring side. Okay, so no Kawalsky on your SG-1. Did you get Ferretti? Carter?"

At least that was something he recognized. "Ferretti leads SG-2 but Sam's on SG-1."

"So the me in your dimension has Captain Knowitall spouting astrophysics at him and you being a Doctor? All that and a hocked libido. Poor guy. He must have a permanent buzzing pain in his head. What are you a doctor of, by the way? Medicine?"

"Archaeology. But I'm also a linguist."

"Well, that makes sense. Who doesn't want a grave robber at his back in a fire fight?" Seeing Daniel's expression, the man touched him gently on the mouth. "Hey, don't pout, I was kidding. They went with the three soldiers and an anthropologist idea in your dimension then?"

Daniel nodded a little dazedly. "Yes."

"Who's your fourth if it isn't Ferretti?"

"Teal'c."

"Teal'c?" O'Neill stared at him in disbelief. "What you mean the first prime guy? Big scary Jaffa with the tattoo on his head? Jeez. That is one screwed up dimension you come from."

"We like it," Daniel told him primly.

"Well, you're welcome to it. I got Kawalsky, Ferretti, and Carter on my team. No grave robbers and definitely no Jaffa."

"So you don't have a linguist?"

O'Neill shrugged. "I speak a little Goa'uld. Enough to get by. I mean I can order a beer and ask my way to the railway station. And I know how to tell a Jaffa that his mother mated with camels of very low birth. That can be useful on occasion as well." He tilted up Daniel's head to examine his cut again, his fingers very warm against Daniel's bruised jaw. Still looking at his injury, he said conversationally, "So, you and me are just teammates then? In your dimension? Nothing more?"

After the way the Teal'c in this dimension had turned out he didn't feel like taking anyone on trust. Daniel pulled his head away from the man's touch and darted him a suspicious glance. "You are so unlike the Jack I know I can't even be certain which side you're on."

"The one that opposes the Goa'uld. Trust me, Doc. I may seem like I'm full of it but I am truly an okay guy. I'm actually not a bad soldier either. You really would be better sticking with me." 

"Look, the credo of the Jack I know is pretty straightforward. He wants to defeat the Goa'uld preferably without killing anyone who doesn't deserve it. What's yours?"

"My philosophy? I guess that would be live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. Special Ops seemed a damned good way to achieve it. And the Stargate program was more of the same only much more interesting."

"Because of Charlie?" Daniel looked at him with new sympathy.

O'Neill frowned at him. "Who?"

"Your – son?"

"I don't have a son, Doc. Never have had."

"No son? What about Sara? What about…?" Daniel realized O'Neill wasn't covering up. "So you never married Sara in this dimension? You never had Charlie?"

"Uh, that's a big fat negative. Definitely not the marrying kind. Much more the playing the field kind. Hey, you may only live once but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try everything that's fun as many times as possible."

"Don't you think that's a little – immature?"

"Never claimed to be deep, Doc. Just fascinating." He gave Daniel a grin that Daniel had to admit almost qualified as 'charming'. Almost.

Daniel moistened his lips again. "Okay, so in your reality, you're not married, you never had a son, and you joined the Stargate program because it was – dangerous and exciting and you're an adrenaline junkie."

If O'Neill had any shame about who he was he was disguising it well. He held up a finger. "Well, actually – technically – I am married, just not in the usual way."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, I sort of married this girl on Abydos. Kind of. Sweet girl. Real looker. She taught me some of the native lingo – real tongue-twister, but then you would know that, being a linguist."

Daniel felt rather faint. "Sha're?"

"Yes." O'Neill looked at him in surprise. "She's in your dimension too?"

"She was my wife."

As the room began to revolve, he felt a strong hand on his elbow. "Hey – put your head between your knees. I guess that Teal'c character worked you over more than I realized. You okay?"

"No." Daniel put his hands up to his face. "How could you marry her? You don't even love her."

"I'm very fond of her." O'Neill said it apologetically. "Like I said, she's a sweet girl. But it was one of those weird ritual things. I didn't even know we were married until the next morning. Hey, don't look at me like that. I visit. Every three months they unbury the 'gate and I go and check on them all to see how they're doing. Take some toys for the kid, that kind of thing."

"You have a _child_?"

"Little girl. I'd show you a photograph but I figure if I do that I'll be bound to get my head shot off in the next half an hour. I've seen those war movies." 

"Oh God." Daniel wrapped his arms around himself and rocked backwards and forwards.

"Hey, look, I'm sorry."

"Damnit, don't you see?" Daniel stared up at him fiercely. "Sha're would have been better off marrying you. She's still alive in your dimension because she married you instead of me. She's still alive because you didn't stay on Abydos and open the damned gate."

"So in your dimension, she's…? O'Neill winced. "Not alive? Okay." He felt a hand rubbing his back gently then familiar fingers tightened on his shoulder. "And that's a no, Doc. She's still alive in my dimension because it's a different dimension and things happened differently there. That's all." It was the first time the man had really sounded like the Jack he knew. Daniel looked up in surprise and saw that familiar compassion in the man's brown eyes.

He found his voice. "If you're anything like the Jack I know, you're a much better man than you think you are. There are certainly worse people Sha're could be with in your dimension." _Like me.  
_  
"Can you tell me what happened to her in yours?"

Daniel did so, in as few words as he could, determined not to crumple again in front of someone who was, after all, a comparative stranger.

There was a pause before O'Neill said quietly, "That sucks." He patted Daniel on the shoulder again. "Sounds like the me in your dimension hasn't been taking care of you too well."

"That's not Jack's job."

"Yes it is." O'Neill got to his feet and dusted himself off. "You're a civilian, he's a soldier, that makes it his responsibility to take care of you. I'd say he was definitely falling down on the job."

"I'm sure Jack would say you were welcome to try to do any better," Daniel said dryly.

"Well, I think I probably could, you know." O'Neill held out a hand to Daniel. Daniel sighed and took the proffered hand. The colonel gave him such a firm tug to get him up that Daniel ended up in the man's arms. "I'm not saying I'm more efficient than the O'Neill you know. I think I'm just – better motivated." As he held Daniel against his chest, the man gave him another broad smile.

Daniel felt a little uncomfortable as the moment lingered. "Um – could you…?"

O'Neill set him back on his feet. "There you go." He reached behind him and brushed off Daniel's seat. "You got a little dusty there."

"Thank you." Daniel pulled back out of reach and darted the man a quick look.

O'Neill was looking simultaneously innocent and pleased with himself. Daniel found his behavior more than a little disconcerting, especially as he looked so much like the Jack O'Neill he knew but acted so very unlike him. He couldn't help liking this man – he was _Jack_ after all – but he was trying to fight his instinctive tendency to trust him completely just because he happened to share the name, face, and genetic code of his best friend. The Teal'c in this dimension hadn't turned out to be anything like the one he knew, after all. There was nothing to say this Jack didn't have evil twin tendencies as well.

As though he'd read his mind, the man said, "You _can_ trust me, you know." As Daniel looked unconvinced O'Neill grinned at him. "Want to blow this popsicle stand?"

"You have a plan?" Daniel asked warily.

"Don't I always?"

Daniel opened his mouth to say 'No, actually in my experience your idea of having a plan is to yell at Sam and me until _we_ come up with something' but then bit it down. He felt a curious unwillingness to say anything that could be construed as criticism of 'his' Jack in front of this Jack. Carefully he said, "Sometimes."

O'Neill gave him an amused glance. "You know I'm getting the distinct impression your dimension got the short straw when the Jack O'Neills were being handed out."

Daniel gave him a dark look. "Well, I'm starting to think I never appreciated the Jack and Teal'c in my dimension anything like enough."

O'Neill slapped him gently on the shoulder. "Hey, like Carter said to me when I first met her – you really will like me when you get to know me." He turned and looked through the bars. "Now let's get the hell out of this place."

 

An hour later Daniel couldn't help noticing they were still very firmly behind bars but not wanting to play the part of the peanut gallery he hadn't yet pointed it out. On the positive side, his head had stopped bleeding.

"Do you think serpent guards have any honor codes?" O'Neill enquired over his shoulder.

Daniel blinked at him from his place on the floor. "According to Teal'c they have a very complex honor system."

"I mean do you think they're gentlemen at heart?"

"In what way?"

"Well, if I pinned you up against the bars and started acting like I wanted to make little anthropologists with you – "

"I'd be seriously worried about your grasp of basic biology."

" – and you yelled for help. Do you think they'd come running and open the door so they could drag me off you? Or do you think they'd just stand there and enjoy the show?"

Daniel narrowed his eyes. "Here's an idea – let's not find out. Let's think of a completely different plan instead."

"Well, I could just play tonsil tennis with you, but that would stop you being able to yell for help."

"I said a completely _different_ plan."

"You can't blame a girl for trying." There was a pause while the other Jack hummed quietly and rocked on his heels, apparently trying to think of a new strategy. Daniel closed his eyes and tried to think around the thumping in his head. After a moment's silence the other Jack said, "How long is it since your wife died?"

"Almost a year."

The other Jack nodded. "Right. So – are you – seeing anyone?"

Daniel looked at him in disbelief. "Are you – hitting on me?" First, scary Teal'c sticking his tongue down his throat, and now Jack O'Neill flirting with him? Was there something in the water in this dimension?

O'Neill shrugged. "Pretty much."

Daniel looked around at their surroundings pointedly. "Do you ever act like an Air Force colonel, Colonel?"

"Hey, just because the me in your dimension is clearly remedially slow on the uptake that doesn't mean every Jack O'Neill in every alternate universe has to be as boring as he is."

"Well, the Jack O'Neill I know may have his faults but he'd never get distracted in the middle of a mission just because his hormones started jumping."

O'Neill glanced at Daniel. "I hate him already."

O'Neill had given him the damp handkerchief and told him to keep pressing it against his forehead until the bleeding stopped, and Daniel had spent the last half an hour surreptitiously watching the man testing all the bars and checking out all the possible weaknesses in the walls. He couldn't deny this Jack _seemed_ as efficient as the Jack O'Neill he knew. In between his search for an escape route, O'Neill had also told him about the way he and his team had been lured into the quantum mirror trap by a fake distress signal. 

As he tugged at the base of the last two bars, O'Neill said over his shoulder, "You have to admit this Teal'c character has pretty good taste. You are clearly the pick of your team and I am definitely the pick of mine." 

"And yet so modest with it." Daniel took the handkerchief from his head and looked at it. It had so many red stains on it, he couldn't work out if his head was still bleeding or not. He decided that he liked 'not' best and so would go with that assumption.

"Cute _and_ funny. You know I definitely think whichever Jack O'Neill finds you first should get to keep you. Which, for those people not keeping up on current events, would be me." 

Daniel looked up to find O'Neill giving him a shit-eating grin. That made such a change from having his head bitten off when he said something remotely waspish that he couldn't help smiling back. Then he collected himself, coughing quickly. "Well, fun as I'm sure entropic cascade failure is to go through I think I'll pass."

The man came back over to where he was sitting and crouched down in front of him. "How's that head doing? And Carter was yapping on about that ECF stuff but I have to say it was so damned boring I kind of tuned her out."

"The Jack I know does that too, all the time. To Sam and to me."

Tilting up Daniel's head, O'Neill peered at the cut on his forehead intently. "At least the bleeding's almost stopped. Are you getting any double vision? Trails?"

"I just have a headache."

"And I would never tune you out by the way. Not ever."

Daniel looked into two warm and amused brown eyes and had a painful memory of his Jack looking at him like this; as if he liked Daniel; enjoyed his company; wanted to share a joke with him before anyone else. The days when they'd both been so much on the same wavelength that Daniel hadn't imagined it would ever alter. 

O'Neill must have seen his expression, because he put a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, what's wrong? You okay?"

That gentle touch and sympathetic tone was a little hard to take as well. Daniel remembered all those times Jack had asked him if he was okay; those sympathetic fingers patting his arm or squeezing his shoulder. He felt abruptly desolate at the loss and had to turn his head away.

"Hey?" O'Neill's voice was almost too gentle to bear. He put a finger under Daniel's chin and eased his head back round. "What sonofabitch put that look in your eyes? Tell me his name and I will turn him into an ugly stain on the floor the next time I see him."

Daniel couldn't help smiling, despite himself. "There is the little matter of you and me having to go back to our own dimensions when we get out of here, Colonel."

But for once O'Neill wasn't smiling. His hand tightened on Daniel's shoulder. "It was me, wasn't it?"

"What?" Daniel looked up at him in surprise.

"Has the me in your universe been treating you badly?"

"No! Jack would never…" 

O'Neill held up his hands in supplication. "Okay. Okay. Keep your boxers on, Doc. You clearly have an inexplicable fondness for the evidently IQ challenged O'Neill in your dimension so I promise not to criticize him again."

Daniel collected himself, embarrassed by his own vehemence. "Thank you." 

When O'Neill touched his bare feet, he couldn't help giving a little jump, those fingers unexpectedly warm against his cold toes. The man began to rub his feet briskly; doing it as though this was so much the most natural thing in the world that Daniel didn't quite have the nerve to object. As he rubbed, O'Neill said conversationally, "It's because he's disabled, isn't it? That's why you're defending him?"

"What?" Daniel stared at him in confusion.

Sable eyes glanced up at him innocently. "Well, I'm presuming he's sight impaired in some way. Is it a problem having to take his Seeing Eye dog with you on every mission?" Before Daniel could object, O'Neill added smoothly, "And has anyone ever told you how doable you look when you sit around with your mouth open? You know a guy with a _lot_ more self-control than me could definitely take that as an invitation to kiss you…"

Daniel promptly closed his mouth with an audible meeting of teeth. As O'Neill continued to rub Daniel's feet with the most innocent expression on his face, restoring the circulation and delicious warmth to his frozen toes, Daniel opened his mouth, realized he was already three protests behind, and closed it again. After a long pause he said in a voice that sounded a little breathless, "You are nothing like the Jack O'Neill I know."

He got sideways grin. "Good. And just for your information, I think you should know I'm definitely more fun than your average O'Neill and I'm bound to be _much_ better in bed than all the boring hetero versions because I'll have had so much more practice than they have. You might want to file that away for future reference."

"I don't think that's information I'm going to have any use for, thank you, Colonel," Daniel told him sternly.

O'Neill stopped rubbing his feet, stood up and held out a hand. As Daniel automatically took it, he pulled Daniel up again; once more managing to yank him into his arms. This time Daniel couldn't stop himself from breathing in a lungful of the familiar smell of aftershave and sweat that he had come to associate with safety, comfort and strength. It was so long since he'd been this close to Jack that it had extra power over him. He had an almost unbearably vivid memory of sobbing in Jack's arms while the man rubbed his back and rocked him like a child. He missed Jack so painfully it was like a stab wound.

"Hey." Strong fingers tilted up his chin. "You've got that look in your eyes again. You know I'm just marshmallow on the inside and you are going to break my heart if you keep looking like that."

Daniel's voice come our hoarse and a little shaky. "Just been kind of a tough day, Colonel."

A hand was stroked through his hair, very gently, and a callused thumb traced a line underneath his left eye. He could feel that his lashes were wet now it had been pointed out to him, but if he refused to look up and see the compassion in those brown eyes, he could pretend he hadn't cried just because his Jack didn't care about him as much as he used to. That was too humiliating to bear so he would just avoid dealing with it. Although the fingers carding through his hair couldn't have been gentler, he was even more appreciative of the matter-of-fact tone the man used. "Let's see if we can't make this a better day."

Daniel swallowed hard. "Good idea." 

He lifted his gaze and found O'Neill looking at him with nothing other than kindness in his eyes. The man seemed to get it in an instant that he needed things kept light or he was in serious danger of losing it. He stopped stroking Daniel's hair and squeezed his shoulder instead. "We're going to get out of here and we're going to get you home, okay?"

"Okay."

The man moved away to give him some time to collect himself, deliberately turning his back on him to stare out through the bars as though lost in thought. Daniel hastily scrubbed at his eyes with the sleeve of his borrowed jacket, thoroughly embarrassed by the damp trails the action left on the cloth. After a long enough pause for Daniel to sort himself out, O'Neill turned back round. "Right, I've always found the old ones are the best so why don't you play dead, I'll yell for help, then I'll lay the guy out when he comes in?"

Daniel blinked. "It took you an hour to come up with that?"

"Well, you vetoed my threatening-your-virtue plan – which would still be my personal favorite – and anyway I've thought of an interesting variation."

"They won't care that I'm dead." Daniel pointed out as he lay back down. He tried not to shiver as the chill damp of the stone floor seeped into his skin.

"I'll make 'em care, the bastards."

As he unwillingly stretched out on the cold floor, Daniel realized that was now twice this man had got him up on false pretenses then pulled him into his arms for apparently no reason other than to – pull him into his arms. He didn't know if he was finding it annoying or flattering to have someone going through all these little maneuvers just to make physical contact with him. With a sudden shock of recognition, Daniel realized it was so long since Jack had put a hand on him he was actually neither annoyed nor flattered, he was just grateful to be touched at all.

 

"Ready?"

Daniel nodded.

"Here goes nothing."

As Daniel played as dead as he could, O'Neill clattered his food plate across the bars, yelling, "Hey! Hey! Get a medic in here! The kid's stopped breathing! Hurry, damnit!"

Daniel had been afraid the man's anxious yells would just meet with the silent indifference of an empty corridor, so when a serpent guard turned up, even if he was moving at a decidedly leisurely pace, it was one better than he'd hoped for. But he still thought Colonel O'Neill was being over-optimistic if he thought appealing to their compassion was going to work. In a universe where Teal'c was a cold-eyed sadist who looked more than willing to rape him just because he could, Daniel didn't hold out much hope for the humanitarian instincts of the ordinary Jaffa. It wasn't even as though the information he had was that important. If this Daniel died, Teal'c could just spin the dial on the quantum mirror and go grab another Daniel Jackson from a different dimension.

The serpent guard confirmed his fears by saying only, "You will be silent."

"Damnit, I told you, the kid's stopped breathing. I think he's going into a coma. He needs some help in here."

The serpent guard sneered. "You must think I am stupid."

"No, I just thought you might remember how it felt to be human. You know from the days before they put that worm in your gut. Christ, your boss grabbed him for a reason, didn't he? He must want him alive."

This time the serpent guard came right up to the bars to ensure that his indifference could not be made any clearer. He curled his lip disdainfully. "There are plenty more where he came from."

O'Neill acted so fast Daniel didn't even see his hand move. It was only as the guard cried out in shock and the other Jack sprang back from the bars with something long and white wriggling in his grip that Daniel understood what he'd done. His mind was still trying to process the realization that the man had just put his fist through the bars, snatched the larval Goa'uld from the Jaffa's pouch and was now retreating to the far side of the cell with the furious symbiote as a hostage. That, he now realized, had always been the true plan.

O'Neill stood at the back of the cell and waved the symbiote at the serpent guard who was still clasping his abdomen in shocked disbelief. "Don't think there are plenty more where this came from though are there, tinhead? You want wriggly back you're going to have to unlock the damned cell."

The serpent guard jerked up his staff weapon. "Give the symbiote to me!"

Grasping the furious symbiote firmly behind the head so it couldn't bite him, and holding it in front of himself as a shield, O'Neill gave the serpent guard an unpleasant smile. "You blast me, you kill the snake baby. How long is it you guys can go without one of these, I always forget? I think the Tok'ra give you about an hour, tops, but hey I always think those guys are optimists."

The serpent guard primed the staff weapon and pointed it at Daniel. "Give it back to me or he dies."

"Yeah well that's a very scary threat." O'Neill shrugged. "Quite apart from the fact the poor kid popped his clogs at least an hour ago, I don't even know who the hell he was. Now open the damned cell or I am going to kill your little pal here."

As the serpent guard hesitated, the other Jack tossed the symbiote onto the floor and then planted his boot squarely on top of its tail. As the creature lunged and writhed under his right foot, he lifted his other foot and prepared to bring his heel down on its head.

"No!" The serpent guard fumbled for the key device he carried then wrenched at the door.

Daniel had seen Jack do this enough times to know what was expected of him in this situation. He had to wait until the guy was inside the cell and then he had to hit him low and hard. He tensed as the door swung open, muscles bunching in readiness, then as the serpent guard stepped across the threshold Daniel launched himself at him with all the force he could. He managed to hit him in the midriff with the force of his upward trajectory, and sent the guard crashing into the far wall. The key device skittered across the stone floor to rebound off the bars. As the Jaffa tried to bring up his staff weapon, Daniel seized his arm and slammed it hard against the bars. The staff weapon hit the floor with a clatter just as the guard got his other arm free and knocked Daniel across the cell.

As Daniel crashed to the ground, he saw O'Neill snatch up the staff weapon and drive the end of it straight into the Jaffa's abdomen; as the Jaffa crumpled O'Neill used the staff weapon like a baseball bat to hit the guy with everything he had. Daniel flinched at the sound of bone snapping. When he looked again, the Jaffa was lying on the ground with blood trickling from his mouth, eyes open but unseeing, neck clearly broken. He saw a wriggle of something pale and malevolent coming towards him and then O'Neill was stamping hard on the ground; something crunched under his boot; but he slammed his foot down twice more for good measure. Daniel shuddered as the man lifted his boot to reveal a sole sticky with the green ooze of dead symbiote's blood. He knew he ought to be voicing some objection to the man having just effectively murdered a hostage, not to mention having killed an immature specimen of a sentient species which…

It was no good. He couldn't even pretend he believed it. He could argue for the rights of any other species in the galaxy, but Daniel couldn't find any part of himself which was anything other than relieved that damned symbiote was dead. He was sure Sam thought that he regretted it but if he was faced with another tank of those things he would still pull the trigger.

O'Neill strode across to where Daniel was and held out a hand. Daniel automatically took it and was yanked to his feet. The man gave him a look all too reminiscent of his own Jack when not in the best of tempers. "What the hell was that?"

"What?" Daniel stared at him.

"What were you doing tackling that guy?"

Daniel blinked in confusion. "I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I thought that was the plan: you lured him in here and then I tackled him."

"You think I'd come up with a plan that involved an unarmed archaeologist with a concussion throwing himself at seven foot of freakin' serpent guard armed with a staff weapon?"

"Well, what was I supposed to do?"

The man gave him a look of exasperation. "What I told you to do. Lie there and play dead."

"While you fought off a serpent guard and his larval Goa'uld single-handed?"

"I'm a soldier, you're a civilian. Civilians do _not_ take on serpent guards, okay, and do you know why?"

Daniel fought the urge to stick his tongue out at him. "Why?"

"Because they could get killed!"

Daniel looked at him for a moment. "Colonel, how old do you think I am?"

"Right now I'm more concerned with your life expectancy, Doctor Jackson. Which I would put at about five minutes if you try any more dumb stunts like that." He took Daniel's arm as though he was a naughty child and towed him after him, picking up the staff weapon without even needing to look down to see where it had landed. Daniel barely had time to snatch up the key device the guard had used to open the cell door before he was being hauled out into the corridor after a Jack O'Neill who was suddenly reminding him all too much of the one he knew. 

The stone passageways were lit by torches but their flames had a greenish light; the walls composed of square cut stone blocks illustrated with scatterings of unusual glyphs, the air vibrating with the low hum of an unidentified heat source. With a jolt Daniel realized this mixture of apparently ancient Earth civilizations overlaid by advanced Goa'uld technology had become so familiar to him that he barely noticed it any more. Was it really only a few years since he had seen his first Horus guard in Ra's pyramid ship on Abydos? Sometimes it was difficult to remember there had ever been anything but this. He would have liked to study the hieroglyphs here and see if they had evolved any differently in this dimension, but the other Jack was striding along at considerable speed and despite his own long legs, Daniel was hard put to keep up with him.

Only when he had checked down all the passageways and led Daniel along several identical corridors before taking temporary shelter in an alcove did the man look at him again. "Okay, kiddo, I think it's time we laid down some ground rules for you doing what you're told and generally making a little more effort to not get yourself maimed or killed."

"Look, Colonel, I've been on SG-1 for almost four years. What do you think I usually do in combat situations?"

The man glanced at him in surprise. "The O'Neill where you come from takes you into _combat_ situations?"

"What, you think Jack, Sam, and Teal'c send me home every time some Jaffa appear?"

O'Neill blinked. "I don't know. I was sort of presuming they took you if there were any ruins or stuff that needed translating and took a soldier if it looked like they were going into a war zone." He looked Daniel over again. "How old _are_ you anyway?"

"Thirty five." Daniel made sure he accompanied the words with a 'Don't you dare look surprised' glare. 

As O'Neill stared at him in unconcealed astonishment, Daniel realized he was going to have to work on fine-tuning his glares. Having gone to college at an unusually young age he'd had a bellyful of wiseass comments from jocks about it surely being way past his bedtime if they saw him out after seven thirty. And the word 'babysitter' could still get his hackles up even now. The word 'geek' didn't thrill him too much either. 

The way the other man's jaw was still hanging was downright annoying. Daniel narrowed his eyes. "As I told you, I go on every mission SG-1 goes on. _Not_ just the ones to uninhabited worlds that have been declared danger free zones, okay?"

For a second O'Neilllooked genuinely taken aback by both Daniel's words and his obvious annoyance, but then he rallied and gave Daniel an assessing glance. "You know, you're beautiful when you're angry."

Daniel wrenched his arm free from his grip and held up a warning finger. "Don't start."

"Sorry, couldn't resist, you look so damned hot when you're glaring at me. And hey, we just had our first fight. If we were a couple we could go and have some make-up sex now." He gave Daniel a winsome grin. "What do you say? There's bound to be a bedroom around here somewhere."

Shaking his head in disbelief, Daniel said, "You never give up, do you?"

"You have to admit it would be more fun than playing stamp on the symbiote in a confined space. Those things squick the hell out of me. The second I get back to base these boots are going straight in the incinerator." O'Neill took Daniel's arm again and towed him after him.

"Where are we going anyway?" Daniel demanded.

"We need to find our gear. Then we need to find the mirror thing. Then we need to figure out how to use it. Then we need to get you home."

Daniel stopped. "No. We need to find out who else is being held prisoner here." He held up the key device. "Then we need to rescue them."

"Oh Jeez. Come on, these guys are soldiers, they can get themselves out. You're a – "

Daniel just looked at him and the other man swallowed the end of his sentence before trying again. "I was going to say, of course, that you're a fully-fledged member of an active field unit with several years of combat experience under your belt."

"I'm so glad that's what you were going to say, Colonel."

O'Neill sighed heavily. "Okay, well there's no one else here from my dimension that I've heard about. What about yours?"

"Three Tok'ra operatives unaccounted for."

He groaned. "I hate the freakin' Tok'ra. Whenever they show up there's always trouble. They never share information with us. They use us like guinea-pigs every time they have a new bit of technology to try out. Apart from Carter's dad and Marty they're all a complete pain in the…mikta."

Daniel couldn't completely hide a smile and the man looked at him suspiciously. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing." Daniel led the way down the corridor. He knew O'Neill too would dive in front of him in a minute and start making with those annoying hand signals Jack always used, but for the minute he was going to go in front. "I've just realized you're a lot more like the Jack O'Neill I know than I thought."

***

"Please, tell me you've made some damned progress?" O'Neill rested his hands on the table and glared between the three of them. They all looked stressed and twitchy and they'd been working for hours without a break, but he didn't care. What he wanted right now were results and all they were giving him was head shaking.

"Sir, none of us have ever had the opportunity to study a quantum mirror before. NID would never allow us to look at the one held at Area 51 and General Hammond ordered – "

"Carter, don't tell me things I already know. Tell me you're going to be getting Daniel back soon."

She looked up at him in mingled reproach and misery. "We're doing the best we can, sir, but this is a little more complicated than trying to jerryrig a remote for your VCR."

O'Neill couldn't even say that was a low blow. If anything he was kind of pleased she was still capable of slamming him when she had to. He'd been so bad tempered recently even Daniel had gotten so he didn't like to make him angrier than he was already. _  
_  
Selmac said, "And it is not only Daniel's whose life is at stake here, Colonel. Three of our operatives are also missing."

"Colonel O'Neill, we are endeavoring to grapple with extremely complex trans-dimensional physics," Narim put in quietly.

"All you have to do is work out how to switch the damned thing on!" O'Neill retorted.

Narim looked up at him in some exasperation. "Colonel O'Neill, all our research so far suggests that this mirror cannot be activated without a remote device. We do not understand the technology we are dealing with, and we do not know any way to deduce its composition while it is inoperative."

"So, you're saying that you can only work out how it works well enough to knock together a home-made remote once it's switched on, and you can't switch it on without a remote?"

Carter nodded. "Pretty much, sir. We'll keep trying, but at the moment any breakthroughs we make are going to have a lot more to do with luck than judgment. If you or Teal'c can think of any alternate strategies I think now would be a very good time for you to share them."

She appeared and sounded exhausted. He supposed futility could do that to you. The three of them had been beating their heads against this thing for hours now and all they'd come up with was more and more proof that they weren't going to be able to do what they had to do to get Daniel back alive. It was so unlike her to admit defeat that he was a little taken aback. She met his gaze. "Sir, bottom line: by the time we work out how to do this I don't think there will be anything of Daniel left to save."

Her statement hung there in the silence and he felt his guts twist cruelly. For a moment he couldn't get anything out, and then he forced himself to say something, anything, to prove he wasn't going to crumple: "Kind of a shame we destroyed that mirror, huh?" 

Her eyes told him she would have thought more of him if he'd just admitted how devastated he was, but he couldn't; the truth was she didn't know how devastated he was by the prospect of losing Daniel. It wasn't something he could talk about, or even acknowledge, only avoid and deny.

"You destroyed a quantum mirror?" Jacob demanded in disbelief.

Carter darted him a look of annoyance. "Dad, you're the one who is always telling us we shouldn't play with technology we don't fully understand. Two people came through from another dimension, they happened to be friendly but they could just as well have been hostile. We didn't have any choice." 

"Are you certain that it was destroyed, Major Carter?" Teal'c put in.

"General Hammond gave the order." 

Teal'c returned her gaze evenly. "But you did not personally supervise its destruction?"

"No, it was packed up and shipped back to Area 51 where I presume Colonel Maybourne – " Her eyes widened. "I see your point, Teal'c."

"Colonel Maybourne?" Narim enquired.

"He's the guy currently awaiting trial for treason for selling out our Stargate program to the Russians." O'Neill ran a hand through his hair. "The one who before that was running an off-world operation to steal technology from your good selves and our other allies."

Narim regarded him steadily. "Not the most reliable of men, then?"

"Indeed." Teal'c glanced across at O'Neill. "I do not think it likely that a man of Colonel Maybourne's character would truly have destroyed a valuable alien artifact that might be of some benefit in the battle against the Goa'uld."

"Now that you mention it, I think you're right." O'Neill put his hand on Carter's shoulder. "Teal'c and I are going to ask Hammond to send someone to check out Area 51, see if they don't have a quantum mirror filed under lost property somewhere. With any luck Maybourne might actually be helpful for once. He's got nothing to lose and quite a lot to gain by cooperating with us, after all."

She made a face. "That won't help us with the remote. The one that went with the mirror Daniel found on P3R 233 was destroyed in the other dimension, and Doctor Carter took her remote back with her."

O'Neill tried to restrain his impatience. "Carter, you're not thinking like Maybourne – and thank God for that. Do you think a guy on the stealing spree he was on, with access to a quantum mirror, will have restricted himself to this dimension? Anything that wasn't nailed down, and he could carry, he'll have grabbed. I bet he has a remote. He probably has three. We just need to persuade him to admit it and then tell us where it is."

She nodded. "Yes, sir. We'll keep trying with this one, but I'd have to say that right now I think Daniel's best hope of a rescue is Colonel Maybourne having stuck to his track record as a – "

"Weaselly piece of scum?"

Carter gave him a tight little smile that told him on any other day she might have found that funny but right now she was feeling too damned sick inside. "Yes, sir."

He gave her shoulder a sympathetic squeeze and then nodded to Teal'c. "Let's go talk to General Hammond, shall we?"

***

Daniel took one look at the cell then turned his head away. He didn't know the names of these Tok'ra but their faces were vaguely familiar; and they were people from his own dimension, which somehow made their pain even more real.

"And here's some they did earlier." Although the words sounded callous, Colonel O'Neill's face was a grim mask.

Daniel made himself look back at them. "I presume the memory device didn't work on them."

The three Tok'ra were lying dead in a cell. At least Daniel was pretty certain they were dead. They had obviously been tortured and they were all lying there very still, covered in blood, and with their eyes open. All the same, he knew he had to go in there and check. It might be that their symbiotes were still alive. If they were, what the hell was he going to do? They couldn't live outside a host body for longer than a few minutes. As he stepped forward, the other Jack caught his arm. "I'll do it."

"I have seen dead bodies before." 

O'Neill looked him in the eye. "So have I. Lots of times. That's how I know it doesn't get any easier however many times you have to do it." He held up the staff weapon. "You watch my back."

Daniel nodded and took the weapon. As O'Neill went to check the Tok'ra for any lingering signs of life, he couldn't help thinking how much like the Jack he knew this one was after all. Not the flirting, obviously; his Jack had never tried to come onto him during a mission – for which he supposed he should be grateful as it was _very_ disconcerting; but in other ways this Jack O'Neill was a lot more like the man Daniel had been working with for the past three years than the man who had told him he was deadweight only that morning. 

For the first time it occurred to him that Jack would be worried about him. There had been real anguish in that last 'No!' and them having had that stupid disagreement wouldn't be helping. Sam would be trying to figure out how to make the quantum mirror work while Jack got in the way and asked lots of questions then didn't let her tell him the answers. Teal'c would be overdosing on guilt. He remembered the look in Jack's eyes after Daniel had staggered through the first quantum mirror with his shoulder smoking. Oh crap, the guy would be going nuts. Daniel had to get back there and let them know he was okay; that the Bad Teal'c hadn't raped him or killed him or even tortured him. That they were still home to him and he'd never doubted for an instant they were doing all they could to find him.

"This one's dead."

O'Neill sounded brisk, emotionless, but Daniel saw the way that muscle jumped in his jaw. He wondered what it was about soldiers that they felt they had to hide their feelings all the time. It was no wonder so many of them ended up being divorced by their exasperated wives. The miracle was that any woman put up with them for longer than a week. Or any normal person, come to that. Into which category he was definitely putting himself.

He watched the man move to the next Tok'ra and check his neck for a pulse, then hold a hand in front of his mouth to see if he could detect any breath. "This one too."

"What about their symbiotes?" Daniel said awkwardly.

The man shrugged helplessly. "I don't know how to tell without an MRI and to be honest even if they're still alive in there, what the hell could we do for them? I'm not being host to anyone. I'm sorry but – squick city and then some."

Although Daniel privately agreed he couldn't help thinking of Selmac and Lantash. He didn't exactly have warm fuzzy feelings towards them but he did know them; they were allies. It had been Lantash as well as Martouf who'd accompanied them into hell. And it had been Lantash as well as Martouf who'd died in the SGC right in front of him. He shuddered at the memory. 

"Okay, this one's had it too, let's get the hell out of here – " As O'Neill straightened up the dead man's hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. 

Daniel didn't blame the guy for almost jumping out of his skin. That was very obviously a dead man and yet it was very clearly looking up at the other Jack through gold-glowing eyes. The voice grated quietly: "Colonel O'Neill."

"Hey…" He gave the Tok'ra a sickly smile. "How are you doing?"

"My companions and my host are already dead and I am dying. Nothing can be done for any of us. But the information which has been gathered from the enemies of Apophis must not be allowed to reach him. This Apophis is intending to make an inter-dimensional alliance with his other selves. He intends to use the resources of all of his counterparts to defeat the System Lords and any enemies of the Goa'uld in each dimension in turn. He intends to be not just master of this universe, but of every universe. He must not be allowed to proceed with his plan. He must be stopped."

"How?" 

The Tok'ra used his dead host's face to perform one last smile. "Despite your attempts to hide it, you are a clever man, O'Neill. You will think of something." The glow faded from his eyes and the body slumped dead and already cold.

"Oh Jeez – " O'Neill snatched his wrist away from the other's fingers. "I just had a conversation with a corpse."

Daniel ran a hand through his hair. "Well, this day just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?"

"Oh it's been fun all the way." He got to his feet and backed up. "Any ideas for this saving the universes stunt we're supposed to be pulling off with just you, me, and a staff weapon?"

"We destroy the information he's already gathered, then we hope Apophis only has one mirror and we destroy that too."

"Then we can never go home."

Daniel swallowed hard. "I know. But what choice do we have? This Apophis is thinking a lot bigger than the one I know and despise. If he ever met up with his other selves every dimension would be in – "

"Deep shit. I know." He looked at Daniel and said quietly. "Do you have anyone to go back to?"

Daniel opened his mouth to say that yes, he had Jack and Sam and Teal'c and the SGC to go back to, then collected himself. "Not really. My parents are dead. My wife is dead. My academic career is dead. My grandfather is off with an alien race learning how to defeat the Goa'uld. I'll be mourned, I'm sure, but I won't really be missed." He hadn't meant to sound that brittle and bitter.

"What about me?"

Daniel blinked at him. "What?"

"What about the me in your dimension? Don't you think he'd miss you?"

"He'll get over it. He's suffered worse losses and got over them."

O'Neill caught his arm. "Doc, I've only known you a couple of hours and I'd miss you like hell. We don't both need to stay here. I can send you back to your dimension and then blow up the mirror."

"You have a wife and child. I don't. If anyone needs to go home, it's you."

"Sha're could pick up a better husband at any yard sale than I've been to her."

"Not the point. She loves you. So does your daughter. You have an obligation to them not to get yourself killed." As O'Neill looked unconvinced, Daniel said, "Take it from an orphan, Colonel, losing a parent is not something you get over in a hurry. And if you're anything like the Jack O'Neill I know, then you must be one hell of a father. You owe it to your daughter to get yourself home."

O'Neill took the staff weapon back and looked up and down the corridor. "Let's argue about this later, okay? For the moment we still have to check out the rest of these cells and find our gear. If I don't get my grenades back neither one of us is going to be blowing up anything. Although of course, if you let me, I could still blow – "

Daniel held up a warning finger. "Don't even think about finishing that sentence."

"Has anyone ever told you that you're very sexy when you're strict?" O'Neill automatically took point again, carrying the staff weapon as though it belonged in his hand. "In fact, you're very sexy all the time. How the _hell_ does your O'Neill keep his hands off you?"

Daniel thought of all those little pats on the shoulder Jack had used to give him; the man ruffling his hair as he limped beside him on their way back to the Stargate; rubbing his back; taking his hand to pull Daniel up… Then he thought of how long it had been since Jack had met his eye, let alone squeezed his shoulder or given him one of those reassuring little touches on the arm. He gave the other man a bleak smile. "Oh, believe me, Colonel, the Jack O'Neill I know doesn't find that any problem at all."

 

They had searched every other cell and found them empty. Some had ominous bloodstains on the floor but there had been no more bodies, for which Daniel at least was feeling eternally grateful. It had been bad enough to see those tortured Tok'ra, if he'd found a Jack or Sam like that, he really didn't think he could have borne it. 

Now they were hiding across the corridor from what they both hoped was the room where their gear was being kept. They had watched a serpent guard walk in there carrying a pack which O'Neill had whispered might be his, and then come back out again almost at once, so they were hoping for the best. Daniel had never thought he would feel odd without a weapon, but he had to admit he would have welcomed the weight of a sidearm against his thigh right now.

There was only the one serpent guard standing outside the chamber. O'Neill let Daniel get a quick look at the lie of the land and then pulled him back out of sight. "Okay," he whispered. "We don't know if there's anyone within earshot so we don't want to use the staff unless we have to. I'll go out there and see if I can – "

"No." Daniel sighed. "Look, Jack and I can do this one in our sleep. I go out there, the serpent guard says 'Kree!' I put my hands up and look scared. You sneak up behind him and – disable him."

Their eyes met and Daniel let the older man know that he knew what 'disabling' was going to entail in this instance, that he didn't like it, but he could live with it. They were fighting for a lot of realities here and sacrifices were going to be inevitable.

"Your O'Neill uses you for bait often, does he?"

Daniel returned his gaze levelly. "Jack's got a hundred percent record of not letting the bad guys permanently kill me, Colonel. I'm just hoping you're as good as he is."

"Under the circumstances, so am I. Has anyone ever told you you're too damned trusting?"

"Jack tells me that all the time."

"I'm starting to think this guy has more brain-cells than I gave him credit for." He shrugged in resignation. "Okay, we'll do it your way, but I warn you, if I screw this up and you get killed I am never going to forgive you."

"Seems fair enough." Daniel took a deep breath and then wandered out into the corridor looking as dazed as he could.

"Kree!"

He did as good an impression as he could of a man too dopey to have noticed there was six foot six of serpent guard standing ten feet from him until that instant, jumped violently then put up his hands. 

A second later he turned his head away in revulsion as O'Neill put his hand over the Jaffa's mouth to stifle his cry then drove his knife into the man's back. Still keeping his eyes firmly averted, Daniel waited until he had heard the sound of the knife slicing again and so knew the symbiote was also dead. He realized he knew why O'Neill had stabbed the guard in the back instead of cutting his throat, because although death was usually a little slower, there would be less blood and they could hide the body without leaving a telltale trail. He wondered when the hell he had started absorbing all this information, and if there was any way he could ever manage to forget it. Thinking of all the Daniel Jacksons out there who had never been recruited to the SGC, never got to travel through the Stargate, but also never had to learn all these things, he didn't know if he pitied them or envied them.

He went back and picked up their staff weapon, picked up the one the dead Jaffa had dropped as he was murdered, waited until O'Neill dragged the dead guard in through the doorway, then followed him in and closed the door. Then he turned around and saw what was waiting for them.

Daniel's first thought was that it looked like a garage sale. All those tables around the side of the room. Clothes on one. Weapons on another. It was only when he saw the labels in Goa'uld that he started thinking about the holocaust. That was when the room began to spin a little. 

O'Neill strode over to the table where the weapons were lying. The way the man snatched up that P-90 like a long-lost lover reminded Daniel vividly of the Jack O'Neill he knew. The man squinted down the sights of his P-90, ejected the clip, checked it then jammed it back in again. He picked up another and checked that one then held it out to Daniel. "Here you go, Doc."

He had to go into the room to take it but it sent little shivers up and down his spine to do so. O'Neill didn't seem to notice his reluctance, his attention already captured by the next table, but as Daniel's fingers closed on the weapon he could have sworn the metal felt as chill as though it knew its true owner was now a ghost.

Picking up a jacket, O'Neill grimaced. "Hey, what do you know? It's my size. I mean what are the odds?"

Daniel saw the bloodstains on the front of the jacket and felt the bile rise in his throat as he realized who it must have belonged to. "Oh God."

The next jacket O'Neill picked up had a burnt hole in the back which suggested its owner had died from a staff weapon blast. Daniel saw the older man's jaw clench, then he put that one down and picked up another one. He spoke quietly. "Find yourself some boots that fit."

Daniel automatically recoiled and the man looked at him over his shoulder. "They're all dead, Doc. They really don't need their gear any more and there are good reasons why people don't go into combat situations barefoot. There are packs over there. There should be spare socks in them. Go find yourself some socks and some boots, put them on, then sit down and take some deep breaths. Okay?"

It was actually easier to do what he was told than not in this instance. At least it gave him something to do that didn't involve watching O'Neill go through those bloodstained and staff-weapon blasted clothes. He wondered how many Jacks had died here. How many Sams. How many Kawalskys and Ferrettis and entire SGC units had been tortured and killed so that a parasite inside a poor captive scribe could dream of ruling the galaxy. 

When Daniel pulled the spare socks from a pack lying on the table something skittered out with them to roll across the table. It was automatic to catch it before it rolled off the edge. He opened his hand and stared at the lipstick in confusion, wondering what it was doing with all this Air Force equipment. The realization that this must have been Sam's pack hit him like a punch in the guts and this time he couldn't stop the physical reaction ripping through him. O'Neill caught him as his knees gave out, helping him down onto the ground.

"It's –"

"I know." The man's tone told Daniel that this Jack was every bit as gutted as his own would have been by the realization that at least one Samantha Carter had died here. But even knowing they were both devastated didn't make the situation feel any better.

Daniel wrapped his arms around himself and rocked backwards and forwards, still clutching that lipstick. It was the same shade his Sam wore. He remembered the first time he'd seen her apply it with such swift expertise after they'd finished gearing up and were about to head out. Her embarrassed little grimace in response to what must have been his look of surprise. "It stops my lips from chapping." The grin he'd tried to hide as he followed her out. His relief that she was human and fallible enough to have a little personal vanity when he'd been thinking of her as some kind of superwoman up until that point. "Oh God… Sam.…"

"I know, Doc, I know." He felt a hand rubbing his back gently. "Look, let's just get what the hell we need and get out of this chamber of horrors." 

Daniel nodded, keeping his head down. He was just going to focus on these socks, not where they'd come from. As he pulled them onto his cold feet, he was aware of O'Neill next to him, picking up boots from the table and trying them against his own. When he put a pair back with a shudder, Daniel realized they must have had blood on them. He wondered if this Jack had any idea how close he was to losing it right now. The Jack he knew would have done. He missed that Jack with a sudden fierce longing that even having another man with his face and voice and inherent kindness couldn't lessen. 

"Try these." The boots were put down next to him before the man crossed over to the table where more weapons were lying.

As he pulled on what was probably a dead Jack O'Neill's boots over a dead Sam's socks, Daniel scanned the line of equipment and felt even sicker as he saw how much this Teal'c had managed to accumulate. A lot of people seemed to have died so that Apophis could be master of the universe. If they didn't stop him it was obvious that a lot more people would die as well. He remembered how it had felt to be invisible; unable to be heard or seen by the people he cared for; how desperately he had wanted to get 'home'. And he still did, that was the trouble, he still wanted to get home. But Apophis had to be stopped and the only way he could think of was to destroy the quantum mirror. Something you had to be in the same dimension to do.

"You okay?"

Daniel looked up to find O'Neill had already pulled on his vest, strapped on a sidearm, and a knife, and was stuffing extra rounds into his pockets. As Daniel nodded, the man picked up a pack and upended it over the table, scattering its contents before swiftly beginning to repack it with new equipment. Daniel knew he had to follow his example. He had to stand up, put on a vest, strap on a sidearm, pick up the P-90 the man had given him, and get ready to blow up that mirror. As soon as it was discovered they'd escaped there would be serpent guards all over the place. This was a brief window of opportunity and they needed to make the most of it. There was no room on this mission for an anthropologist who couldn't deal with the fact that some people who shared the same genetic code as his friends had died here. The only way to stop that ever happening again was to destroy that mirror. Sitting around trying not to throw up on these borrowed boots was _not_ going to get that done.

Daniel determinedly got to his feet and went over to where O'Neill was stuffing things into a pack. The boots felt odd but his feet were certainly warmer and he felt more efficient than he had when he was barefoot. He found another vest which looked very similar to his own, trying not to think about who it had been taken from but unable to stop his mind asking the question. Another Jack? Another Sam? Another Kawalsky? The thought made him feel sick inside but he determinedly picked up a sidearm. 

O'Neill was impatiently pressing buttons on a gold-colored box until the top dissolved into the sides with an audible hiss. "Hello. This looks interesting." He held up some discs and Daniel crossed over to look at them. "Have you seen these before?"

"No. Have you?"

"I think so." O'Neill tapped one of the disks against his P-90. "Last time we were over at the Tok'ra HQ – and boy do those guys so _not_ know how to throw a party – there was a big argument going on over this project Marty was trying to get off the ground. Because of the Tok'ra having so much trouble getting hosts they keep losing a lot of important information when their hosts die and the symbiotes have nowhere to go so die with them. So, Marty had come up with this idea for the elders to stick a memory device in their heads and then record their knowledge for the good of the Tok'ra nation. Apparently there's quite a lot of opposition to the idea and most of the Tok'ra thought it was a lousy plan because– "

"If that information ever got into the hands of the System Lords…" Daniel grimaced at the thought.

"Exactly. Last thing I heard the Tok'ra High Council were having another meeting and were probably going to pull the plug on the whole project and make Martouf destroy the disks he had so far. Carter was trying to mediate between Lantash and Selmac who were going at in hammer and tongs. At which point I have to say I got very bored with the whole discussion and went off to – "

"Play some – tonsil tennis with Freya?" Daniel enquired innocently.

O'Neill blinked at him. "She has a thing for me in your dimension too?"

"Apparently."

"Well, how about that? Not that it's ever going anywhere because having Anise watching from the peanut gallery tends to dampen my ardor more than somewhat. Anise thinks Freya could do better and tends to mention it. Often."

"Given the fact you have a wife already and have been trying to get into my boxer shorts since you first met me, I think Anise has a point." Daniel picked up one of the disks. "So you're saying you think this could be the information this Teal'c has been getting from the people he's captured?"

"I think it's definitely possible."

"Then we need to destroy these as well." 

O'Neill tossed one onto the floor and stamped on it but it didn't so much a crack. "Damn."

Daniel frowned. "Do you know anything about explosives?"

The man looked at him in disbelief. "Do I know anything about…? I was in Special Ops for crying out loud!"

"I take it that's a yes. I was just thinking that if there was some C4 around here somewhere we might be able to blow up the mirror with a timed device that would give us time to get out of this dimension before the explosion. Then we could take these disks with us and destroy them on the other side."

"Or use them ourselves."

Daniel darted him a straight look. "Colonel, the information on these disks was obtained under torture. I don't think anyone has the ethical right to use it for any purpose whatsoever."

"Not even to defeat Apophis?"

"Not for anything."

"The Tok'ra won't agree, you know."

"Do you?"

O'Neill grimaced. "In theory – probably. In practice – no. I think we have to use any advantage we get. Sorry."

"Fine." Daniel picked up the disks and started pushing them into the other man's pack. "Then you take them back to your dimension and you use them any way you want to. But I'm not having any part of it."

Snatching up double handfuls of the disks and shoving them into his pack, O'Neill said, "Where you come from, do you and I have these sort of moral dilemma-ethical disagreements a lot?"

"Every now and then." Daniel picked up another handful and shoved them into the pack.

"Just as a matter of interest, do I ever win?"

Daniel moistened his lips, tossed the last disk into the pack and then met the man's gaze. "About as often as you beat me at chess, Colonel."

The man narrowed his eyes. "You think I'm going to take these home with me and then destroy them without looking at them, don't you? You think I'm going to realize you were right and do what you think I should do just because it's the right thing to do?"

Daniel shrugged. "I think what you do in your own dimension is your own business, Colonel, and has absolutely nothing to do with me."

The man's hand shot out so fast, Daniel was taken completely by surprise; fingers closed on the front of his vest and yanked him forward so they were barely an inch apart. The other Jack gazed into Daniel's eyes, breathing huskily, "You know if you came back to my dimension with me, I'm sure you could teach me to be a better man, Doctor Jackson. And seeing as how your Jack O'Neill is so damned perfect he doesn't even put the moves on you, I'd say my need was definitely greater than his."

Daniel felt the man's breath against his mouth, smelled the familiar comforting scent of Jack's sweat and aftershave, felt the warmth of those strong fingers tracing an encouraging tattoo against his arms, and realized why people experimented sometimes. He realized too that he had been given the scenario here he had rather envied Jack over that time loop business: no consequences. He could do anything he wanted with this Jack O'Neill. He could even do things he didn't think he wanted but might like, and it would have no impact whatsoever on his relationship with the Jack O'Neill back home.

Except it would, of course. Even leaving aside the fact they were pretty much in the middle of a suicide mission here and this was definitely neither the time nor the place, he couldn't let a man who was to all intents and purposes his best friend take what Daniel was inclined to think of as a fairly major liberty with him, then go back and act exactly the same with a Jack O'Neill who had no idea aforesaid liberty had ever been taken. If Daniel didn't like what this Jack was clearly very eager to do to him, it was going to be weird being around Jack, and if he did like it, it was going to be even weirder. 

He dropped his gaze, trying not to look at the man's mouth or eyes, or to inhale the scent of him any more than he could help. "I can't." After a pause he added, "Not while there's a chance I might be able to go home."

O'Neill slowly released him. "But…?"

Daniel shrugged and raked up a smile from somewhere. "Well, let's just say that if we both wind up in the same different dimension, I give you permission to buy me dinner."

There was a pause before O'Neill gave him a slow-burning smile, which Daniel had to admit, did leave him feeling a little breathless. "I'll hold you to that."

Daniel collected himself. "We need explosives."

"Right." O'Neill continued to gaze at him.

"We have to destroy the mirror, Colonel, or Apophis is going to take over the whole damned universe."

"Right." O'Neill was still looking at him like he was hypnotized.

Daniel could feel a strange warmth creeping through him as those brown eyes seemed to gaze straight into his soul. He had never been so aware of the sound of another human being's heartbeat, the warmth of another man's body heat only a breath away from his own.

"We have to do it _now_."

That seemed to get through and O'Neill put a hand up to his head. "Right. Do you know what C4 looks like?"

Daniel bristled in indignation. "Yes."

"Okay, then you look down there and I'll look up here and we'll just have to hope that some of these poor bastards were on their way to blow up something when they got caught."

***

He was going to expunge the last few hours from his memory. The waiting. The yelling because everything was taking too long. The more waiting. The more yelling. Major Davis trying to calm him. General Hammond trying to calm him. Teal'c trying to calm him. The yelling when the calming had failed. And then, finally, success.

"You've got to love a rat who always runs true to form." O'Neill couldn't stop that grin breaking out as he and Teal'c carried the quantum mirror back into the chamber on Tollana. Well, Teal'c carried the mirror, and he carried the remote, but then Teal'c didn't have anything wrong with his back.

He saw Carter jerk her head up, see what he and Teal'c were carrying, and her face dissolve into the biggest smile of relief he'd ever seen. Narim also looked a lot happier than he'd done even a few seconds before. "Colonel O'Neill, you were successful."

Jacob was already clearing them a place on the desk so Teal'c could set the smaller mirror up beside the larger one. "Let's chalk one up to the right hand never knowing what the left hand is doing."

"Not to mention helicopters so fast they're still only at the prototype stage and General Hammond having all those favors he could call in for an emergency."

"Um – sir, it was actually only the remote we needed. You didn't need to bring the mirror as well."

O'Neill waved a hand at Teal'c. "The deal was it was destroyed or it was taken off world so we thought it was better to leave it here. Just in case, you know." He tossed Carter the remote.

She caught it easily. "So, Maybourne did manage to steal a remote? I never thought I'd say it, but I'm feeling quite well disposed towards him right now."

"You and me both, Carter."

She was already turning the dial on the remote device, Goa'uld-blasted dimensions flickering across the screen like someone else's bad dreams. "Colonel, you're the only one who saw what the reality Daniel was taken to looks like so you're going to have to identify it." She pulled out a chair for him and held out the remote. "According to Daniel, you have to turn it in very small increments or you miss out entire dimensions."

O'Neill unwillingly sat down in the chair and took the remote. He was very eager to get after Daniel, but he'd hoped someone else could do this fiddly stuff then he and Teal'c could go and kick some alternate dimension Jaffa butt. As he turned the dial what he considered a very small amount, about six dimensions rushed past in a blur. He grimaced. "Whoa, this is harder than it looked when Daniel was doing it."

"Very small increments, sir."

O'Neill tried again and this time saw an SGC building, a beach, an Area 51, and what looked like an airplane hanger flit past. "None of those." He glanced up at Teal'c. "This could take some time."

Teal'c's face was grave. "Time is exactly what we do not have, O'Neill."

"I know." O'Neill turned the dial again and got a blur of three SGCs. "I know."

***

It was as they were heading for the chamber with the mirror that they saw the golden sarcophagus. Daniel tugged on O'Neill's sleeve to stop him. "Look."

The man raised his P-90 in automatic response. Daniel could practically see his hackles rising as well. "Do you think Snakeboy's sleeping in it?"

Daniel blinked at him. "They're not vampires."

"But they do need to – renew themselves or whatever, don't they? I figure we go over there. Blow up the sarcophagus along with whoever's inside it. _Then_ blow up the mirror."

Wishing he'd never pointed it out to him now, Daniel tightened his grip on his arm. "Colonel, how many serpent guards do you see in that room?"

The look of exasperation he gave Daniel was _exactly_ like the Jack he knew. In fact, the more Jack O'Neills Daniel got to meet the more he came to the conclusion they were all the damned same under the skin. "None, Doc, that's my point."

As the other man made to stride into the room, Daniel hung onto his arm. "And how many do you _think_ there would be if there was a royal Goa'uld in there?" As O'Neill looked at him blankly, Daniel added, "And how many serpent guards do you think there _will_ be after you've used a hand grenade to kill Apophis even if he is in there? The mirror is the problem."

"Apophis is the problem," the man retorted. "Kill Snakeboy and the whole scam is over. If we blow the guy to pieces there's not a sarcophagus in Goa'uld Town that can put him back together again."

"Kill Apophis and his loyal first prime is definitely clever enough to go and contact the Heru'ur in this dimension and offer him the same plan, not to mention going through the mirror to find _another_ Apophis and offering _him_ the same plan."

"Why would he bother if his god's dead?"

"In my dimension, Teal'c's primary motivation is his desire to free his people and he would walk through fire to do that. I'm guessing that in this dimension Teal'c's primary motivation is revenge. He wants Cronos dead and he thinks Apophis is the right Goa'uld for the job. For all I know he might want every Cronos is every universe destroyed."

O'Neill frowned in obvious confusion. "What's his beef with Cronos?"

"Cronos murdered Teal'c's father in my dimension so I bet it's the same here. And as Greek mythology tells us, that's always been a major incentive for long drawn out revenge plans that take a lot of other people down with them. The fact is, we can't know for sure what the Teal'c in this dimension wants, but we do know he is aware of the mirror's capabilities and we have no guarantee he's going to stop using it even if Apophis is dead. So, as I said before, the mirror is the problem, not Apophis."

O'Neill looked at him for a moment and then gave his head a little shake. "Damnit, are you always right about everything?"

"Can we please get on with this?" Daniel led the way down the corridor but the other man caught him up in a few swift strides and overtook him.

"As a matter of interest, have I ever slugged you in your dimension?"

"Once. When you had a virus. I mean when Jack had a virus. It made him act like a – caveman."

A look of disbelief flitted across the other man's face. "I had a virus that made me act like a caveman and I ¬ _hit_ you? What ever happened to that primal club-him-over-the-head-drag-him-off-by-the-hair-and-hump-him instinct?"

Daniel glared at him. "Well, luckily for me, it didn't take Jack that way."

"Why did he hit you?"

"Because he was the alpha male and he wanted to make sure I didn't think about mating with Sam."

"Carter?" The other man spluttered in disbelief. "Captain Knowitall? No way in hell!"

"Look, she tried to – mate with him, Jack took her to the infirmary. I saw the scratches on his neck and asked him what happened. He told me Sam had attacked him. I expressed concern about her. He got angry and hit me. End of story. And why am I even telling you this?"

"Hah!" O'Neill held up a finger. "What _I'm_ hearing is – Carter tried to mate with your O'Neill. Your O'Neill didn't want to know. You showed an interest in Carter. He got jealous and decked you. But of whom he was jealous is entirely open to interpretation…"

Daniel looked at him for a moment open-mouthed and then narrowed his eyes. "Don't start on Jack. I told you, we're _friends_."

"You have to admit my interpretation of his motives also fits all the facts."

"No it doesn't."

"Yes, it does."

"Doesn't."

"Does."

" _Doesn't_." 

Daniel gave him a glare as he emphasized the word and the other man shrugged. "Okay, have it your way. If you want to think your Jack has a thing for his 2IC you go right ahead. It makes me look a lot shinier for one thing. I may cheat on my wife and sleep around a little but at least I don't sexually harass my own subordinates."

Daniel almost rose to the bait then gave himself a mental shake. This Jack was clearly thinking that if they only had enough fights they would get to that make-up sex eventually. Well, he wasn't going to play that game. He decided to change the subject and asked conversationally, "How come Sam is still a Captain in your world anyway? She's a major in mine."

"Perhaps because where I come from her commanding officer doesn't want to fuck her?"

Daniel promptly forgot all good resolutions, grabbed the other man by the front of the jacket and slammed him up against the wall. "Don't you _ever_ say that about Sam or about Jack, you son-of-a-bitch! Sam earned her promotion ten times over and Jack would _never_ let his judgment be affected by – "

"Hey! Okay, I'm sorry." O'Neill held up his hands in supplication. "I was out of line and I'm sorry. But we're on a mission here, remember? Universes to save? A mirror to destroy? Remember that?"

Daniel collected himself, counted to ten, then held up his own hands in apology. "Sorry."

"That's okay." Before Daniel had time to react, he was grabbed, one hand clasped to the back of his head as he was bent backwards over the man's arm until he was practically horizontal. He squeezed his eyes closed as a face swooped down to meet his, then warm lips were pressed against his open mouth, a wet tongue demanded entrance, and he found himself being thoroughly kissed by a very determined Jack O'Neill. Sixty oxygen-starved seconds later, he was pulled up and set back on his feet, breathless, disheveled, and for the moment at least, speechless with surprise.

The other man gave him an apologetic shrug. "Sorry. Had no right to do that but I couldn't resist. You're just so damned hot when you're angry."

"But – !" 

O'Neill grabbed his arm and pulled him after him. "No time for that now, Doc, you can yell at me later." 

Daniel could see the man was already totally focused on the task at hand. How could the guy do that? Just kiss him and then be back to being completely intent on their mission a couple of seconds later? Daniel looked around dazedly and realized they were right outside the chamber where the mirror was. He was still trying to stop his mind from shrieking at him that _Jack_ had just kissed him, and not a fraternal kiss either: that had been an exploring-his-tonsils felt-like-it-was-trying-to-suck-the-lungs-out-of-his-chest, jangled-every-now-very-mixed-up-hormone-in-his-body, kiss. He could still feel that damp heat on his lips, could still taste that tongue in his mouth…

"Doc?"

"What?" Daniel jumped when the man touched his arm and then stared at him in still rather breathless confusion.

O'Neill frowned. "You okay?"

"No!" he hissed at him indignantly.

O'Neill looked at him in surprise. "Christ, you must have been kissed by a guy before."

"Why must I?" Daniel demanded.

"Because you're thirty-five and you're so damned – hot."

"Well, the men in my universe obviously have way more self-control than the ones in yours, _Colonel_ , because up until thirty seconds ago I had never been kissed by a 'guy' and didn't want to be, thank you very much."

"Hey," the other man held up a finger. "If it hadn't done anything for you, you wouldn't be so mad at me."

"You are so unbelievably full of –!" 

As the other Jack held up the C4 in a silent reminder of what they were here for, Daniel choked on the end of his sentence, glared at him horribly and stamped into the chamber. As he saw a flicker of light cross the mirror he increased his pace, but there was no sign of the remote and his heart sank. 

"Where is it?" the man asked.

Daniel shrugged. "Not here. But I think the mirror might be switched on."

"Okay, then we set the C4, go through to wherever that mirror is linked to and hope we can find a remote there. I'm going to get you home one way or another." 

Daniel recognized that tone so well: a Jack O'Neill determined to believe everything was going to come out all right despite the all the evidence to the contrary. Standing in the doorway to guard their exit, gaze raking the corridor, and P-90 at the ready, this Jack O'Neill looked every inch the Air Force Colonel and despite the way he had just grabbed him and kissed him, Daniel noticed all the habitual trust he had for the Jack O'Neill he knew was automatically aligning itself to this man as well. It was as though any Jack O'Neill anywhere was magnetic north to him, the compass point of his trust being drawn to that direction in a way Daniel couldn't seem to control.

Daniel had to put his P-90 on the table to take out the C4 and prime it. He put the explosive as close to the mirror as he could get it without actually touching it, setting the timer for ten minutes as he did so. The image in the mirror was of a corridor in a SGC somewhere. There was staff weapon damage but no one in sight. He wondered if the first prime had gone through it again. If he was out there now, kidnapping more Jacks, more Sams, perhaps even other Teal'cs, driven by his lust for revenge, or his loyalty to his false god. If they blew up the mirror, that Teal'c would never be able to get home with his captives, but it wouldn't really solve anything to trap the other Teal'c on the wrong side of the mirror. It occurred to Daniel then that the truth he had been skirting round all this time was not just that the mirror needed to be destroyed but that this Teal'c needed to die.

Despite the fact the Teal'c in this dimension had come very close to sexually assaulting him earlier and had undeniably smacked him around more than somewhat when he'd tried to escape, he still felt chilled through inside at the thought of it. There had to be another way because there had to be good in this Teal'c somewhere, there just had to be. There was so much good in the Teal'c he knew he couldn't believe there could be none in any Teal'c, whatever universe was from. He just needed to reach the man he knew inside the stranger with his friend's face…

At the sound of a staff weapon charging, Daniel wheeled around in shock and found himself looking into the cold brown eyes of the first prime of Apophis. Teal'c said softly, "When I have finished with you, Slave, you will beg me for the mercy of a quick death."

***

"When we find the right dimension, Teal'c and I are going to go through alone." O'Neill kept turning the dial gingerly. He was getting the hang of it now even though it was tricky. Made you wonder what kind of fingers it had been built for in the first place. Maybe it hadn't ever been meant for humans at all. Maybe it was something else built by the Ancients or the Asgard. Just one of a lot of things he'd have to ask Thor the next time he ran into the little fella.

"What? Why?"

He glanced up from the mirror to see Carter looking less than thrilled with him. He raised an eyebrow at her and she collected herself before protesting more politely, "Colonel, I just don't think this is a two-man mission."

"The last two-man mission you staged wasn't exactly a howling success, Jack," Jacob put in.

"General Carter has a point, O'Neill," Teal'c put in. 

O'Neill glanced up at them in annoyance. "Thank you for the show of confidence, people, but the point is that I _know_ how far out of my depth I am on this one. That's why I don't want Carter coming with us, because I need someone on _this_ side of the mirror with enough brains to come and get me, Teal'c and Daniel back if I screw up again. Is that clear enough for you all?"

Carter looked unconvinced. "Understood, sir, it's just that – "

"I have no idea what I'm doing, okay? Anyone here who didn't get that the first time? I don't understand alternate universes. I don't like thinking there are other versions of me out there anyway, I like to think I'm unique." O'Neill jerked the dial as he finished each sentence. "And I really don't like thinking there are other versions of Teal'c out there who keep killing the other versions of me. But I would like to get Daniel back in more or less the same condition in which I lost him, so I am going to touch this damned mirror and go through to the damned other side, and Teal'c is going to come with me so I have someone with me who might be a match for the other Teal'c. Then I am hopefully going to find Daniel, bring him back home, and, if I have anything to do with it, never have to so much as look at one of these damned mirrors ever again. But if I should screw up – which is perfectly possible, I want the Tok'ra, the Tollan, you, Carter, and the best brains you can beg borrow or steal from anywhere else figuring out a way to come and get us all back again, because I do _not_ want to be stuck in the wrong dimension – "

"Sir. You need to be looking at the mirror. You're the only one of us who knows what we're looking for." She did look all the same. As she bent down to stare into the mirror, he smelled her perfume, the faint scent of it. He waited for it to impact upon him, braced for it, like roll of thunder after lightning, but nothing happened. He smelled it, her perfume, a trace of talcum powder, was aware of a strand of her newly shorn hair almost touching his eyelid, but he felt nothing at all. He didn't know if he was relieved or disappointed to discover that whatever it was affecting his judgment and shortening his temper, it didn't seem to be his 2IC.

"Colonel – "

The hint of impatience in her tone jolted him out of his thoughts, and he looked up. For a moment his heart leapt as he thought he recognized the chamber and then he saw the painted blue lotuses on the walls. There had been no lotus flowers on the world Daniel had been taken to. Daniel. He gritted his teeth. Better not to think about Daniel as a three-dimensional, vulnerable, human entity, with a voice and a heart and a mind of his own. Otherwise the thought of him in the hands of some evil twin version of Teal'c was just too unbearable. Better to think of him as a mission that had to be accomplished. That way he might be able to hang onto his sanity for a few hours longer.

"Keep turning the dial, Major." His voice sounded brittle, harsh, as if he didn't care. But he was afraid of how much he cared; afraid that if they didn't find Daniel in time and this terrible anxiety turned to aching loss that he wasn't going to get over it. Ever. "He's out there somewhere. We just have to find him…"

***

Daniel hadn't known anyone could move so fast. Even as O'Neill was spinning around to fire and Daniel was still _thinking_ about snatching back his own P-90, Teal'c was across the chamber and grabbing him, jerking Daniel in front of his body as easily as though he was rag doll. For the second time in twenty-four hours, Daniel found himself being used as a human shield to hold off the fire of a desperate Jack O'Neill. Teal'c had his left arm wrapped in a choke grip around Daniel's throat, pulling him up so high Daniel was having to stand on tip-toe, the occasional gulp of oxygen getting through to keep him conscious, but so little the blood was beginning to make rushing noises in his head, like seawater on shale.

"Let him go!" O'Neill was gripping his P-90 so tightly Daniel could see his fingers were white. He could see everything very clearly in that moment. The red numerals on the explosives winking their way lower second by second. The unblinking brown gaze of the other man, the muscle in his jaw clenching as he tried to stare out a Teal'c who knew damned well he'd won this hand. 

He heard the staff weapon charging and his eyes widened in horror. "No!" He tried to grab at the Jaffa's arm, but Teal'c turned sideways, jerking his right arm away from Daniel's grip, while pulling Daniel in hard across his chest to cover as much of his body as possible. 

Jack had told him so many times that in battle even a second's hesitation could prove fatal. As he cried out a warning, Daniel saw the proof of it right in front of him; saw O'Neill falter, saw him jib at pulling the trigger when some of his bullets might hit Daniel, saw that instant of indecision cost him everything as the blast from the staff-weapon smashed into his chest and threw him back against the wall.

"No!" Daniel desperately tried to pull loose, but the other Teal'c kept hold of him, dragging him, still struggling, across the floor as he strode over to where O'Neill was lying with a smoking crater where his chest should have been.

Daniel met his gaze and saw a terrifying blankness come into those familiar brown eyes; life and light leaving them. "Colonel?"

"Hey, Doc…" It was a barely audible whisper. 

Although he was clearly dying, the other man was still trying to reach for his P-90. But as his fingers groped for it weakly, Teal'c kicked it contemptuously out of his reach. He pointed the staff weapon at the dying man again and then lifted it. "No. Enjoy your last seconds. I only wish you had lived long enough to watch me take my pleasure with your catamite."

"Get your hands off him, you son of a…" There was murderous warning in O'Neill's voice, but he couldn't even coordinate his movements now, his fingers still groping for a gun that wasn't there. Blood trickled from his mouth and when it dripped onto his other hand he stared at it as though he didn't know what it was.

Daniel said desperately, "Please, you have to listen to me. In my universe, this man is your closest friend. You've defeated Apophis together. Freed your wife and child. You're closer than brothers. Please don't let him die. Help me take him to the sarcophagus – "

"Be silent, Tau'ri whore." Teal'c's voice was soft and murderous but Daniel barely even heard him. His gaze was fixed on the man who was dying in front of him. Now he knew how Jack had felt on that ship; how it felt to be so helpless when someone you cared about was losing the fight right in front of you.

O'Neill coughed, a rush of blood welled from his mouth and then he slumped quietly to the floor. 

" _No_ …!" Daniel struggled like a maniac, trying to pull himself loose from Teal'c's implacable grip and when he realized that was hopeless, words tumbled from him, trying to make this Teal'c hear him, trying to make him believe that in the dimension Daniel came from the man he'd just murdered mattered to him more than any other. All the hopes and fears of the Teal'c he knew spilling from him in a torrent as Daniel told him that he knew he couldn't really want to do this; to serve Apophis, to remain a slave; knew his courage, his integrity, his compassion – 

"Be silent!"

Daniel kept pleading with him as Teal'c dragged him across the chamber, trying to twist his head round to look at the dead Jack O'Neill lying slumped on the floor in a growing pool of his own blood, Daniel repeating over and over again that Teal'c's people could only be freed if he joined forces with the man he'd just killed, the man who could be revived, please, please, please, if Teal'c would only help Daniel take him to a sarcophagus. Daniel invoked, Drey'ac, Ry'ac, Shau'nac, Bra'tac, Teal'c's father, all of those men and women on Chulak just waiting for the day when they could be freed from the yoke of Goa'uld oppression – 

Teal'c slammed him down onto the chair he'd bound Daniel to before and Daniel read in his eyes that he had succeeded only in turning the man from arrogant and contemptuous to furious and savage. These home truths were clearly ones this Teal'c did not want to hear.

"You're better than this," Daniel told him breathlessly. "I _know_ you. And you're so much better than this. Apophis isn't fit to lick the boots of the man I know you're capable of becoming. Please, help me to help Colonel O'Neill. Help yourself to become the man you could be – "

The blow nearly took his head off. The room tilted up and spun; then as another backhand slammed across the other side of his face; tilted the other way. Head ringing, only hanging onto consciousness by a fingernail, Daniel was dazedly aware of his borrowed jacket being pulled down and twisted tightly to trap his arms, his t-shirt ripped, then his belt was unbuckled, his fly unbuttoned. As he tried to struggle he was slapped again and then again, blood welling from his nose and mouth as he pants were tugged down from his hips.

"No, Teal'c, don't – " He was too full of despair to panic. A universe where Teal'c would murder Jack in cold blood and then rape him just to punish him for speaking the truth, was a universe he would have been so much happier never knowing existed. 

As he struggled desperately to free his arms, Teal'c moved in on him with hatred as well as lust in his eyes. The Jaffa's mouth was pressed against his, teeth biting his lower lip cruelly as his mouth was bruised and bloodied in a punishing kiss. Then Teal'c was biting the soft flesh of Daniel's throat; one hand in Daniel's hair, jerking his head back so Teal'c could worry at his exposed jugular like a vampire, the other hand thrust into Daniel's boxers, jerking against Daniel's groin. Goa'uld words of husky contempt were breathed into his ear. There was real loathing in Teal'c's voice as he told Daniel how hard he was going to fuck him, how loudly Daniel was going to scream, how much the miserable Tau'ri whore was going to like it even though he'd beg for mercy he wasn't going to receive as that erect cock was thrust into him harder and deeper, over and over again. 

This had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power, Daniel knew that. But as Teal'c bit a punishing trail down Daniel's chest, across his ribs, then cruelly bruised the soft skin of his abdomen with more savage bites, Daniel realized that knowing this wasn't about sex didn't really help him when he was about to be raped. He couldn't see the red numerals of the C4 counting their inexorable way down to zero; had no idea if Teal'c had seen him set the timer or not; but he did know that the explosion wasn't going to come in time to save him from this. Even if the bomb went off and saved those other dimensions, the last image burned into this Daniel Jackson's mind was going to be the sight of a Jack O'Neill dying in pain in a puddle of blood, and the last sensation burned into his body was going to be a Teal'c thrusting into him with savage contempt.

He was abruptly seized by his trapped arms and thrown onto his front; the air knocked out of him as he was slammed face down onto the leather upholstery. "Please, Teal'c, please…"

He knew it was futile but one part of him still couldn't believe Teal'c would do this to him; any more than he could really believe the man wasn't going to at least try to revive the Jack O'Neill he'd just murdered. 

"Be silent…" There was real malevolence in that hiss in his ear and the blow to the back of his head set it ringing again. He was still trying to pull his arms free but without success, the panic rising as he wriggled and struggled and they remained trapped by the confining jacket. There was terrible irony in the fact he could still smell Jack on the cloth; still, absurdly, felt comforted by the scent of a man who Daniel knew was never going to be able to protect him or help him again.

He felt his pants tugged down further, his boxers dragged from his hips, a chill breeze snaking across his exposed rear. He heard the sound of something being undone and realized Teal'c was making himself ready; cruel fingers bruised the back of his thighs, forcing his legs open.

"Don't, Teal'c! Please, don't…" Daniel tried not to sound as desperate as he felt but his voice cracked. It wasn't just the prospect of being raped that was making the bile rise in his throat, but the prospect of being raped by _Teal'c_. Overlaying the scent of Jack's sweat and aftershave so resolutely clinging to that jacket, he could smell Teal'c's scent as well, and against all logic a part of him still found it comforting. But in a few seconds, all he was going to associate with that scent was pain and humiliation. 

"Scream all you want to." Teal'c breathed the words into Daniel's ear as he pressed against him. "Your O'Neill cannot save you now."

Braced for the searing pain of being penetrated, it took Daniel a second to realize the weight was abruptly gone from his back. 

He heard strangled words in Goa'uld; shock and murderous hatred overlapping like waves on a beach.

"Daniel!" The voice was so unexpected he jerked his head round in disbelief. 

He read horror, pity, and guilt in those familiar brown eyes and then Jack was tugging at the jacket, swearing, untwisting, and finally wrenching it back up with a rip of cloth so he could get his arms free. Then there were strong hands helping him to sit up, steadying him. "Christ, Daniel, I'm so fucking sorry."

"Not your fault, Jack." The second his arms were free Daniel hauled his boxers back up over his ass then yanked up his pants. It was only when he found he couldn't button his fly that he realized how violently his hands were shaking.

"Christ…" Jack looked scared to touch him. He put a tentative finger to Daniel's jaw, wincing as he looked at his face. Daniel saw Jack's gaze traveling down Daniel's body, taking in the torn t-shirt revealing those angry red marks already darkening into bruises where the other Teal'c had – 

"Where's…?" Daniel jerked his head round and at the look in his Teal'c's eyes felt his blood temporarily run cold. He thought he was quite experienced in self-hatred but as he looked at the Teal'c he knew so well, he realized he was just a beginner.

Teal'c had his alternative dimension counterpart jammed up against the wall, fingers digging into the flesh of his throat as he crushed his windpipe. Over his shoulder, Teal'c said tautly, "Daniel Jackson, did he –?"

"I'm fine, Teal'c." Daniel said it quickly, still hoping he might not have to watch Teal'c kill himself for the second time. "He didn't – I mean, you don't have to – "

He heard Teal'c's soft hiss as he said murderously, "Be grateful O'Neill and I arrived when we did. Had you dishonored Daniel Jackson as you intended, your death would have been much slower…"

"Teal'c, don't – " Daniel saw the flash of a blade and then Jack was between him and Teal'c blocking the view although he still heard the other Teal'c make an inarticulate sound as the knife was plunged into his heart. 

As Daniel flinched, Jack pulled the jacket across Daniel's bruised and bitten chest, saying tersely, "He had it coming."

Daniel jumped off the couch, staggering as his legs tried to do an impression of spaghetti. Jack caught him at once and helped him up. "Easy there, big fella."

There was the soft thump of a body hitting the ground. Daniel darted a glance in that direction and saw the other Teal'c lying dead, eyes open but unseeing. He quickly averted his gaze from the bloodstained knife in Teal'c's hand and turned to Jack. "You have to help me get you to a sarcophagus."

"What?"

Daniel was already staggering across the floor to where the dead O'Neill was lying. Behind him he could hear Jack asking Teal'c if he was okay, reminding Daniel he was going to have to take several hours to convince Teal'c that everything was still okay between _them_ and that Daniel knew Teal'c wasn't responsible for the actions of his other selves. But right now he wanted that soul-stealing piece of Goa'uld technology to work its dark magic one more time, and he needed the help of Jack O'Neill to save Jack O'Neill. "Jack!"

"I'm coming."

Daniel had to tell himself very firmly that death was only a temporary state because looking at that bloody corpse with half its chest missing, it was almost impossible to believe this man would ever breathe again.

"Christ!" Jack recoiled in horror.

Daniel was crouched down next to the other man, lifting his head. It was a dreadful sensation to stare into those sightless brown eyes and he wasn't surprised his Jack had gone white as a ghost; he was probably feeling like one.

"Help me, Jack, you're too damned heavy to carry by myself."

"Daniel, he's had it."

"I told you, there's a sarcophagus. You have to help me get him there." As Daniel caught hold O'Neill's body under the arms, he called across to Teal'c. "There's C4 by the mirror. I don't know how long we've got left but it might not be enough."

"I will attend to it, Daniel Jackson."

Jack grabbed his dead self's feet, saying over his shoulder to Teal'c. "That mirror's our only way out of here, so…" He let a shrug finish the sentence and a brief nod from Teal'c took the place of a reassurance that the Jaffa was aware of the importance of guarding this chamber and securing their retreat.

As they staggered along the corridor with the dead O'Neill between them, Daniel couldn't help noticing how drawn with anxiety the living Jack looked. "You okay, Jack?"

"Peachy." Jack hoisted the dead man's legs up a little higher. "Any word on the Tok'ra?"

"They're all dead. Which reminds me, the pack _he_ was carrying has vital information we mustn't let fall into Apophis' hands. And we have to destroy the mirror in this dimension, and…" Daniel filled Jack in as fast as he could on their current situation and the danger that mirror represented as they carried the body into the room with the sarcophagus.

Daniel didn't even see the guard, he just saw Jack drop the feet of the man they were carrying and then the flash of something silver. A gurgle followed by a thump behind him told Daniel that someone else had just died. He was starting to feel as though his skin was coated in other men's blood today. Jack must have seen him grimace because as he picked up his portion of their burden he quietly said, "Daniel, in our dimension I like to think that guy I just offed is alive and well and rebelling against Apophis. Remember what Teal'c said before."

"Yes. I didn't agree with him then either. Every reality is of consequence." Daniel hit the panel on the sarcophagus with his elbow to make it open, hating the part of himself that could still remember how good that thing had made him feel, hating the sarcophagus for being what it was, yet needing it now as he'd needed it so badly in the past. 

As they lifted the dead O'Neill into it, Daniel flinching from his sightless eyes as they laid him gently in the bottom of the casket, he remembered how it had felt to hold Sha're, dead in his arms, as he asked Jack to wait for him; remembered dragging himself down the corridors of that ship, trying not to black out despite the pain of his wound. The sarcophagus grated closed, like a giant maw swallowing the dead man whole.

Daniel wrapped his arms around himself and sat down on the steps in the chamber. He didn't know how well it worked; how long you could be dead and still be revived; he only knew he needed it to work as much as he ever had in the past; that the only thing which would obliterate the memory of Jack dying right in front of him was if this O'Neill got up and walked out of that sarcophagus.

His Jack seemed torn between guarding the exit from any serpent guards and darting anxious looks in his direction. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," he said it with a sigh. _I've just seen way too many people die today_.

Jack hoisted up his P-90 and looked at him in exasperation. "Daniel, a guy who looks exactly like one of your closest friends just beat you up then tried to rape you, no one would be 'fine' under those circumstances."

Daniel met his gaze. "If the other you survives, I'll be fine. If he doesn't, I won't be."

He saw confusion closely followed by surprise in Jack's eyes. "You and him – hit it off then?"

"He's you, Jack. I was pretty much pre-disposed to like him."

Jack made a face. "The way I've been acting recently I would have thought you'd be pretty much pre-disposed to smack him in the mouth."

Daniel bent his head to hide a smile. "Well, that too of course."

 

O'Neill wondered if he'd ever get used to the way Daniel could always surprise him. It didn't seem right that he should be able to when they knew each other so damned well. But for a guy who had so consistently sucked at all sports throughout High School, Daniel still pitched one hell of a curve ball sometimes. 

As they'd turned around from that mirror and he'd seen what Teal'c's evil twin was trying to do to Daniel, he'd thought he'd definitely be the guy who got there first, but Teal'c had been across that chamber faster than a hurricane. O'Neill reckoned that other Teal'c had known he was dead from the second he saw the look in his counterpart's eyes. O'Neill had seen the shocked disbelief on the other Teal'c's face as he saw himself in a SGC uniform turn to realization that this Teal'c wasgoing to kill him. There had been that brief glance in Daniel's direction and then Teal'c had slammed him against the wall. The only real surprise was that Teal'c had knifed him instead of just twisting his head off his shoulders, he'd certainly looked ready, willing, and able to. 

He was still feeling sick inside about how close Daniel had come to that…fate worse than death thing but Daniel seemed to be waving it aside as unimportant. He'd buttoned up his fly and rebuckled his belt as though his mind was on something else entirely – which it did seem to be. He was now gazing at the sarcophagus with feverish intensity, as though he could will it to work better and faster if he only concentrated hard enough.

O'Neill wasn't sure how he felt about seeing Daniel all knotted up inside about the death of a different Jack O'Neill. It felt – weird. It was probably at least partly on his behalf that Daniel was so upset about that guy dying – hell, it would certainly upset him to see a Daniel from a different dimension dying, so he could understand that – but there was also the thought that Daniel might have got attached to this O'Neill on his own behalf as well. 

In the back of his mind, there was a little niggling worry that Daniel might have met a Jack O'Neill he liked even _more_ than the one he knew. 

When the cover of the sarcophagus began to grate back slowly, O'Neill checked the corridor outside again, torn between looking out for serpent guards and watching the way Daniel reacted to this version of Jack O'Neill.

He remembered how he'd felt waking up in that thing himself after Hathor had tried to turn him into her first prime. It was like coming back from a deep, drugged sleep underwater; one with lots of nightmares you couldn't quite remember but whose atmosphere still lingered.

Still standing in the doorway, O'Neill watched himself sit up, blink dazedly then focus on Daniel, eyes widening in disbelief. "Doc?"

"Colonel." Daniel still had his arms wrapped around himself but he was grinning like an idiot. He didn't seem to care about his bitten lip, those bite marks on his body, that soon-to-be-black eye or those nasty bruises on both cheekbones and on his jaw. In fact Daniel was looking like all his Christmases had just come at once.

O'Neill watched his other self rise unsteadily to his feet in the sarcophagus; watched Daniel hurry forward to support him, putting his arm around the other O'Neill's waist, while the man automatically put his arm around Daniel's shoulder as though it was the most natural thing in the world. "How the hell…?" As he was helped to the ground, the other O'Neill gave his head a shake. "The last thing I remember that Teal'c guy was planning to fuck your brains out and I was – dead."

"Yes." Daniel nodded gravely. "I decided I didn't like that plan."

The other man put his fingers up to Daniel's bitten lip and winced, then lifted back the jacket to look at Daniel's body. When he ran his fingers gently across the bite mark across Daniel's chest, O'Neill took a half step forward although he wasn't even sure exactly what it was he was objecting to. It just felt like a liberty had been taken that he didn't want Daniel to allow. Wanted proof that these two didn't already have the kind of relationship where Daniel put his arm around this guy to take his weight as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and where he thought nothing of this guy running his fingers across Daniel's bare and recently bitten flesh. The other O'Neill glared at the marks on Daniel's body. "Looks like that son-of-a-bitch was pretty keen on Plan A to me?"

He gave Daniel a searching look and Daniel gave him a reassuring smile in return. "The Jack and Teal'c from my world dropped by and decided they didn't like Plan A either."

"Oh."

O'Neill saw the other O'Neill notice him for the first time; saw himself subjected to a searching glance, suspicious and slightly hostile. Very like the way he was probably looking at the other O'Neill right now. He stepped forward. "Colonel Jack O'Neill, I presume?"

"Well, before we found the quantum mirror, I could have answered 'the one and only' to that. Now I have to tell people we come cheaper by the gross." His doppelganger held out a hand. "Colonel."

It was disconcertingly like his own, those long fingers which took people by surprise sometimes, the thumb which had stuck out a little ever since he'd broken it one too many times. He remembered some woman at a party who claimed to be able to guess people's professions had told him he was a concert pianist; he'd been feeling drunk and nasty enough to tell her actually he was a hired assassin for the US Military; luckily for him, people had assumed he was joking.

For the first time in a long time O'Neill felt like squeezing the hand he was shaking very hard and seeing which one of them winced first. He gave himself a mental reprimand and just shook it firmly. His nerves were clearly still shot. He said, "Colonel," in return, but flatly, no inflection.

The other O'Neill released his hand and turned straight back to Daniel. "So, Doc, what's happening with the C4? How long have we got? Did your friends bring a remote for that mirror with them?"

Walking behind them in the corridor as they hurried back towards the mirror room, O'Neill felt unpleasantly excluded. He couldn't help noticing how at ease Daniel was with this O'Neill. It was like watching movie footage of Daniel and himself together, but this time it wasn't him in the picture, it was just someone who happened to look like him. He felt a childish urge to point out to this other O'Neill that all he was doing right now was reaping the benefit of a relationship _he_ and Daniel had been working on these past few years. Daniel trusted him because Daniel trusted _him_. And he trusted him because he had earned Daniel's trust, damnit, just like he'd earned Daniel's friendship. They'd been through all kinds of shit together. They'd weathered bad days and dreadful days and truly appalling days in each other's company. He'd seen Daniel through his wife being kidnapped, the aftermath of being raped, the aftermath of being addicted to the sarcophagus, and the aftermath of being left a widower. He was the one who'd been there for Daniel on all those occasions. He was the one who'd just happened to stop by his office all those times. Who'd taken him out for pizza. Taken him back to his place. Played all those chess games with him. Drunk all these beers with him. Made all those totally futile attempts to make Daniel comprehend the rules of hockey. _He_ was the O'Neill who had been the guy putting all the man hours into this friendship over the past four years. And okay, recently he'd dropped the ball on his friendship with Daniel, failed to be there for him a couple of – okay more like a couple of _dozen_ –times, but that didn't just erase all the friendship that had gone before.

That guy had only known Daniel for a few hours; he was just getting the run-off from Daniel's relationship with him. So there.

He decided he hated the way this counterfeit O'Neill called Daniel 'Doc'. What kind of dumb name was 'Doc'? 'Daniel' was a perfectly good name and you could say it in all kinds of ways. But perhaps it was just as well Daniel and the Xerox O'Neill had picked these different names for each other. It would have given him an even weirder feeling to hear Daniel calling this guy 'Jack', and he might have resented it if this guy had been calling Daniel 'Daniel'. He might have kept wanting to insist the guy call him 'Doctor Jackson' instead. He was on the point of insisting the guy call him 'Doctor Jackson' now, except Daniel was the one who would have to object, and Daniel wasn't objecting. Damnit.

"…I can't believe that fucker messed up your face again…"

He was touching Daniel's face again now, looking at those bruises and wincing like it really bothered him Daniel had been smacked around. Well, the guy might think he minded but there was no way in hell he minded as much as _this_ O'Neill minded; that was what four years of friendship did to you; it made you mind a _lot_ when your friend got hurt. He didn't make a big fuss over Daniel when Daniel got clobbered because that wasn't his way and anyway he'd always got the feeling Daniel would rather no one made a big fuss, but that didn't mean it didn't burn him up inside every time Daniel was injured. This latecomer couldn't possibly care as much as he did about how close that other Teal'c had come to doing what he'd so nearly done. He was sure Daniel knew that, of course. He must know as well as O'Neill did that he and Daniel were _way_ closer than Daniel and this joker could ever be. But Daniel still wasn't pushing the man's hand away or anything and some of the stuff the other O'Neill was saying was downright…flirtatious.

"…sure you don't want me to kiss anything better, Doc…?"

Son-of-a-bitch! How insensitive could a guy be? Didn't he get it that Daniel had just been nearly raped? The last thing Daniel needed right now was some asshole paying him compliments that had all the subtlety and finesse of a skydiving elephant.

Daniel looked mildly amused. "Even coming back from the dead doesn't slow you up, does it, Colonel?"

"Hey, you can't blame a guy for knowing what he wants. And if I ever end up permanently dead I know whose bathroom I'll be haunting."

"Why my bathroom?" Daniel frowned.

The man shrugged. "That's the best place to watch you take a shower, right?"

_Okay, that was way more than enough of this kind of crap!_ O'Neill strode forward, saying shortly, "Let's try to keep our minds on the mission, Colonel."

Daniel said mildly, "I think we all know what's at stake here, Jack."

"Some of us seem to need a few reminders."

Daniel met his gaze then said quietly, "I'm wearing a dead man's boots right now, and Colonel O'Neill is wearing a dead man's jacket. I have a dead Sam's lipstick in my pocket. He has the disks from three-dozen interrogations in his pack. I really don't think we need any reminders."

Before O'Neill could protest that comment hadn't been aimed at Daniel, his evil twin said casually, "You might want to lose the lipstick, Doc. Even in my dimension, the Air Force can get a little sticky about things like that."

O'Neill felt something twist inside him as he saw that little smile on Daniel's face. There had been a time when he was the only guy who could get Daniel to smile after a really bad day. The other guy held out a hand. "Come on, give it here. We don't want your CO thinking I've been teaching you too many bad habits."

It was galling too to see Daniel reluctantly hold out his hand as asked and let the object be taken from him. O'Neill heard the man say gently as he pocketed it, "You have to keep telling yourself that in our own dimensions those other versions of us never even existed."

"That's supposed to make me feel better about them having been tortured and murdered?"

"Yep," the other man nodded. "That was definitely the idea."

Another flicker of a ghostly smile from Daniel. How come this guy had the knack of handling him already? It had taken him years to learn how to handle Daniel and even now he often had to wing it.

"We've got company." The man said it urgently, jolting O'Neill out of his thoughts and he looked over his shoulder to see the serpent guards advancing down the corridor. 

"Damnit." He automatically reached out to put his hand on Daniel's shoulder to urge him forward, but the other O'Neill had already grabbed Daniel's arm and was towing him after him. As Daniel stumbled in his ill-fitting boots, the other O'Neill hauled him up, giving him a hard tug to keep him moving just as a staff weapon blast passed through the place where Daniel had been even seconds before.

Obscurely annoyed about everything, O'Neill wheeled around and sprayed P-90 fire across the corridor, sparks flying up as the bullets bounced off the serpent guard uniform.

When Teal'c appeared in the doorway of the mirror chamber with a staff weapon in his hand, Daniel barely grabbed the other O'Neill's arm in time, forcing the man to jerk up the weapon to send bullets stuttering across the ceiling. "No! That's the Teal'c from my dimension. He's a friend."

The colonel looked doubtful, but the calm way Teal'c sent blasts of staff weapon fire down the corridor behind them seemed to convince him. He shrugged. "Whatever you say, Doc."

Teal'c beckoned them into the chamber urgently. O'Neill ducked another blast of staff weapon fire, then sent more bullets chattering down the corridor. As he continued to fire, Teal'c grabbed his arm, hauled him into the chamber and then slammed the door. A zat blast a second later sealed the lock for the moment.

"Where's our C4?" his doppelganger demanded.

Teal'c turned around and strode across the chamber. "Major Carter was unconvinced that C4 would prove a powerful enough explosive to destroy the material from which the quantum mirror was constructed. She has provided us with an alternative."

"Naquada enhanced, I suppose?" The Xerox O'Neill peered at the new bomb suspiciously. "Carter thinks you can soup everything up with naquada. I think she's trying to get her Harley to run on the stuff."

"It's an Indian, _not_ a Harley."

As they all looked at him in surprise, O'Neill realized that might have come across as a little on the petty, nitpicking, and inappropriate to the middle of a mission, side.

After raising a fairly withering eyebrow at him, Teal'c took a device from his pocket which had to be the remote for the mirror. From his other pocket he took something else, which O'Neill recognized at once and which sent an immediate shudder down his spine. One of Carter's detonators. The kind you stared at and stared at knowing you were going to have to push that button or else a whole bunch of innocent people would die. Knowing that if you did push that button you'd be killing your best friend. The no-winner to end all no-winners. He collected himself. "How much time do we have, Teal'c?"

"There is a thirty second delay, O'Neill. I will press it only as we are about to touch the mirror."

As the serpent guards hurled themselves against the doors, Daniel grabbed the pack that was lying on the ground. The other O'Neill was looking across at the dead Teal'c with murder in his eyes. "Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy," he said softly.

Daniel tugged him away from the body, saying, "Something must have happened to him that didn't happen to our Teal'c to make him turn out like that. It's all forks in the road, Colonel."

"Let's have the philosophy lesson later, Daniel," O'Neill pleaded. "Have you got everything?"

"Yes." Daniel still had hold of the other O'Neill's arm, he couldn't help noticing. He seemed to be afraid the guy was going to get killed again if he let go of him. He knew how that felt from both sides of the equation. There was a time when Daniel had done that with him. He'd trailed around after him like his own little shadow after they'd got back from Hathor's planet, apparently needing twenty-four hour reassurance that he really was Jack O'Neill and not a Goa'uld. It had been annoying but sort of touching as well. But seeing Daniel fuss over this other O'Neill was just downright annoying.

They all stood around the mirror together: Teal'c, Daniel, himself and his double from a different dimension. "On three." O'Neill nodded to Teal'c. "Press it now."

Teal'c did so and Daniel said, "One-two-three," rapidly. They all pressed the mirror simultaneously. Blue light flickered across them.

Then they were in Tollana with Daniel saying, "Switch it off, Sam, quickly – "

The mirror went blank and O'Neill darted a look at Daniel to check that he was still safe, a glance at Teal'c to ensure that he was also in one piece, then looked at the man who had no right being in _his_ universe, damnit.

The other O'Neill was looking at Daniel and Daniel was looking at him. There was something about their expressions O'Neill really didn't care for; not just Daniel's amused resignation, or the other man's full-of-himself grin; the things beneath that. The things that spoke of a depth of relationship that had no right existing after only a few hours together. As he watched them, he saw the other O'Neill lick his thumb, reach out and wipe a trickle of blood from the side of Daniel's mouth. Daniel just stood there and let him do it, just the way he would have let O'Neill do it; but they'd known each other for over four years now while Daniel and this guy had been strangers up until about four hours before.

He kept watching them as Sam hugged Daniel and he hugged her back; holding her as tightly as though she was the one just plucked safely from the jaws of a hostile dimension, in fact squeezing her so hard there was serious danger of her ribcage cracking. He heard her murmur, "It's okay, Daniel," gently into his ear as she held him just as close in return. "You're home now."

As he reluctantly disentangled Sam from his grasp, Daniel said, "So are you."

His eyes looked suspiciously bright and O'Neill realized there was a whole story there he was going to have to coax out of him later and see if he could fix. He hated these damned alternate universes. They messed with your head like the Blood of Sokar.

He watched Jacob slap Daniel gently on the shoulder. Saw Daniel hold out a hand to Narim and shake it, thanking them all for their help in rescuing him. But all the time he was aware of an invisible thread stretched between Daniel and the other O'Neill; an awareness of each other as though they had both taken up residence in the corner of each other's eyes.

As Daniel finished both being hugged and thanking everyone for their help, his gaze went not to the O'Neill he'd known for the past four years, but to his counterpart. As though they were sharing a joke that only they knew.

Perhaps for the first time since he'd known Daniel Jackson, O'Neill felt as if he had become somehow less than necessary to the younger man. Yesterday he'd felt like an essential. Today, he had a feeling he might be only an optional extra. He didn't like that feeling. He didn't like that feeling at all.

 

Daniel looked at Colonel O'Neill and realized there was no good reason for his heart to be beating this fast right now. He hoped no one else had noticed, but standing amongst a circle of some of your closest friends on an alien world having a weak-kneed moment over another man was probably not the most discreet thing he could have done. 

Unfortunately, ever since the man who was and yet so definitely wasn't 'Jack' had died in front of him he'd been wishing he'd said 'yes' to this guy; thrown caution and commonsense to the winds, let the man drag him into a chamber somewhere in that wrong dimension, and do whatever the hell he wanted. Being seconds away from being brutally raped by another Teal'c had brought it home to him even more strongly that sooner or later sex with a man, with or without his consent, might be something life decided he was going to experience. Life had made him experience a lot of things he hadn't been ready for in the past after all. Perhaps he should get a jump on life and the next nasty trick it might have up its sleeve and ensure his first time with a man _wasn't_ a consequence of being sent to some intergalactic prison, being chained to a bed by a leering Goa'uld, or handed round a bunch of serpent guards while Apophis got to watch. Maybe he should get the jump on life right now by letting this other Jack jump him. Except, unfortunately, he'd left it too late. He'd had his chance back in that other universe but it was gone now. He might be a linguist but it was painfully obvious that Carpe Diem was only ever going to be a Latin phrase to him.

Daniel darted another glance at the man sipping something hot Narim had handed him and tearing into a tuna sandwich from Jacob's store of supplies. Jacob had already provided Daniel with a large mug of coffee and was hovering in case he needed a refill. Not for the first time, Daniel had a sharp pang of envy of Sam for having Jacob. A few people in the SGC had murmured negative things about having your father turned into a Tok'ra and what that must be like but Daniel knew what it was like to have a big empty space where someone who loved you ought to be and he would have taken having a Tok'ra for a father over a death certificate and some old photographs any day of the week. 

Teal'c was explaining what had occurred in the other dimension to Sam and Narim. Daniel suspected that Sam, Narim and Jacob must have seen quite a lot of it. The mirror had been switched on the whole time after all so the first prime's attack on him had probably been as visible to them as it had been to Jack and Teal'c; but they were all being much too tactful to admit they had seen anything at all. Narim was nodding gravely as Teal'c told him what had occurred and Daniel felt another spasm of gratitude towards these people who had worked so tirelessly to rescue him and were now working just as tirelessly to protect his and Teal'c's feelings. He made another mental note to spend some quality time with Teal'c once they got back to the SGC. Seeing yourself doing something you would never do in a million years was probably even more traumatic than having something nasty done to you by someone you would never have expected to do it.

Colonel O'Neill returned Daniel's gaze, a quizzical look on his face, that little smile tugging his mouth again. He held up his steaming glass. "You okay, Doc?"

"Peachy," Daniel told him with an ironic smile.

"I bet your Fraiser keeps you in the infirmary for a week."

"Janet likes me," Daniel assured him. "She'll let me go home to rest."

Jack might argue to the contrary but Daniel really wasn't a reckless person; he just believed in the things he believed in and he couldn't switch that belief off at will; and if you believed in things you tended to act on those beliefs. It didn't mean he wasn't aware of any dangers that might be around, or that he didn't care about physical pain or the prospect of violent death. He didn't like pain and he didn't want to die. He really _wasn't_ reckless. But right now he was wishing he were; he was wishing he'd been braver or dumber back there in that wrong dimension and let this wrong Jack do all kinds of wrong things to him because that really had been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and now it was gone…

"Well, the Fraiser in my dimension doesn't like me one little bit. I swear I don't need half those injections she keeps jamming in my butt."

"And just as a matter of interest, Colonel, how many of her nurses have you slept with?"

He was aware of Sam and Teal'c staring at him in surprise, but the other Jack only looked mildly abashed. "Hard to keep track. They keep leaving." He gave Daniel another of those slow burn stares that made Daniel's skin feel fever-hot. "You want to come visit my universe, Doc? I could give you a quick tour of the SGC. We could compare – stuff."

"No." Jack said it so fast Daniel jumped. He'd been so busy gazing at the newly-found Jack O'Neill he hadn't realized his accustomed one was standing right by his elbow.

Sam looked at him in surprise. "Actually, sir. Even assuming there is a Daniel still alive in Colonel O'Neill's dimension, Daniel wouldn't be harmed by a visit. For the first forty-eight hours Samantha wasn't affected by – "

"I said 'no', Carter."

The colonel shrugged. "No problem." He gave Daniel a look Daniel couldn't decipher. "I'd better get back to my own world. I've got a few changes to make."

"What kind of changes?" Jack sounded downright suspicious.

His twin looked the picture of innocence. "I've come to realize Major Kawalsky really deserves to be leading his own SG-unit. Daniel told me he did a very good job on Chulak in your universe. Obviously I want to get some feelers out there to see if the Teal'c in our dimension is a good guy and if so see if I can't recruit him. And, of course, working with Daniel has made me realize that I was wrong about a lot of things. I opposed the three soldiers and an anthropologist idea Major Davis was proposing because I didn't think we were ever going to find a grave robber who could pull his weight in a firefight. Now, I know that isn't true I'm going to change my recommendation to General Hammond, see if we can't get some more balanced teams going out through the 'gate to meet and greet those brave new worlds."

Daniel gave me the man a level look. It all sounded perfectly reasonable, of course. And he thought the Stargate program in the other universe would be improved by those alterations, but he still suspected the high-sounding motives. Going by that wicked grin the man was flashing him now, he was meant to.

Thinking of the person he had used to be, Daniel winced in sympathy for his unknown other self. That poor kid was going to get eaten alive by this wolf in colonel's clothing. He moved over to where the man was standing and murmured quietly, "Look, if you're thinking of contacting the me in your world…"

"I'm certainly going to try."

"I just think you should know I wasn't too – good at the soldier stuff at first. And I would have found you very – intimidating."

"Hey," he brushed a piece of fluff from Daniel's jacket. "I know I come over like an asshole, Doc, but I really do have more decency than to start putting the moves on some innocent little archaeologist who's never stuck his nose outside academia. I'm not going to invite the other you into the SGC so he can sit on my lap. Having seen you in action I just don't think we can afford to be without you."

"So, you're not going to try to – " Jack was still so close he might be able to hear this conversation, and Sam looked like she had her ears strained to catch what they were saying as well. Daniel pulled a face. "You know…?"

"Seduce him?" The man looked as though nothing could have been further from his thoughts. "Certainly not."

Daniel nodded. "Good."

"Not on our first meeting anyway. I thought I'd give it at least a week. Tell me, Doc, how much of a head for alcohol do you have?"

Daniel looked him right in the eye. "I can drink you under the table, Colonel."

"Do you like sports?"

"Love them. Especially hockey."

"What about fishing?"

"Next to hockey it's the thing I enjoy most in all the world."

"Has anyone ever told you how cute you look when you lie? Your nose actually twitches."

Jack stepped between them and pointedly looked at his watch. "Better get you back to where you come from, Colonel."

"If you say so, Colonel." 

Jack's hostility was barely disguised but the other man was concealing his behind easy charm. All the same, Daniel wouldn't have wanted to leave them alone together. They were like a pair of pitbulls who kept walking around each other then pissing on the same lamppost. He didn't know exactly what this was about but presumed it had something to do with there being nothing worse than seeing your own faults mirrored in someone else. The visiting Doctor Samantha Carter hadn't taken to this world's Sam at first either; there had been definite hostility on her part. He wondered how he would feel about another Daniel Jackson from a different dimension? If there were Daniels out there happily married to Sha're and he ever had to meet them would he dislike them because they still had what he'd lost? He actually thought his own Jack was probably a much better man, and certainly a more complex man, than the Jack O'Neill he was currently wishing he'd slept with. He had more respect for the Jack he knew than this man. And obviously he cared for the Jack he knew much more deeply than he did for the one he had only just met. This one was just more…fun to be with.

Daniel realized there were days when he wanted his friend Jack O'Neill to be a complicated, sometimes moody, sometimes caring individual, with his own inner demons to work around; someone Daniel knew so well it occasionally felt as though Jack couldn't graze his knee without it stinging Daniel too. Then there were days when he just wished he could start all over again with a clean slate and a different, much less complicated, relationship with a Jack O'Neill who had no inner demons to speak of, and had never had to forgive any of Daniel's mistakes or ask forgiveness for his own. 

He hadn't realized that was something he wanted, of course, until he met a Jack O'Neill who just enjoyed Daniel's company and didn't mind mentioning the fact. This other Jack also happening to think Daniel was clever, attractive, and worthy of pursuit was something Daniel also found surprisingly flattering. He wasn't sure why he was pleased as well as disconcerted to have a Jack O'Neill making such efforts to…woo him, but he had a sneaking suspicion it was to do with being thought worth the effort. Being flattered because his best friend's double wanted to get him into bed just at a time when his best friend wasn't paying him any attention wasn't exactly the most complex or admirable reaction Daniel could have had to the situation. He admitted that freely. But it didn't alter the fact that he liked being the focus of this other man's attention; liked the way the guy kept catching his eye; giving him little smiles; sharing a secret with him no one else was a part of. Compared with the relationship he and Jack had used to have, it was a poor substitute; compared with the relationship he and Jack had been having recently, it felt pretty damned good.

"Colonel, can you help me to locate your dimension?"

Sam spoke to their guest but her gaze rested on Daniel, and he saw amusement but also concern in her blue eyes. He knew he was going to have to explain to her later why he'd nearly squeezed all the breath out of her body with the relief of seeing her alive and well when he'd stepped away from that mirror. It was going to take him a long time to forget that chamber filled with all those bloodstained SGC uniforms. He knew the Colonel had taken that lipstick away from him so he'd forget about it faster but even without a physical reminder of what he'd seen in that room, he didn't think it was going to fade very quickly.

O'Neill peered over her shoulder to shake his head at the world she was offering him. "No. Too drab. Find me something with more orange in it."

Sam smiled despite herself. "I was hoping to find you the dimension you came from, Colonel."

"Must you? I'm sure there's one out there where the SGC was relocated to Maui. Can't you find me that one?"

Daniel darted a glance across at Jack who was pulling the kind of face usually associated with bad smells. Daniel frowned. "You okay?"

"Fine." Jack looked pointedly at his watch. "I'd just like to get you back to the infirmary and have Fraiser check you out."

"I'm really okay, Jack."

"Well, you look like shit." He grimaced straight after he'd said it. "Sorry, I didn't mean – you just look a bit rough, Daniel, and that wasn't a pleasant experience you went through back there." There was an awkward pause before he said, "You look nice. It's just your bruises that don't – look nice I mean."

Daniel blinked at him in surprise. If there hadn't been all those other people around, most of whom were now looking at Jack as though he'd gone nuts, he would have said 'Jack, you reallydon't have to pay me compliments just because another you does. Just acknowledging my existence is fine.' He settled for giving him a grateful smile. "I'm fine but thank you anyway. I appreciate your concern." That sounded too formal. This was getting very weird. He met a second Jack O'Neill, and suddenly he and Jack were acting like strangers on a blind date?

Jacob looked between them as though he'd never seen them before, then gave his head a shake as if to clear it. "Daniel, while Colonel O'Neill is finding his own universe again, do you want to fill me in on what happened over there?"

It was a useful distraction even though he was still much too aware of their visitor making Sam giggle despite her best efforts to remain stern as he gave his assessment of each dimension she was finding.

"…look at that one, Beige World… Jeez, that SGC certainly took a hammering. So far it seems to be Apophis one hundred and seventy, Good Guys about three… Hey, a beach, go back to that one. You are such a spoilsport. The Carter in my dimension never lets me have any fun either… Yeuch – let's skip past the ones with dead bodies in the corridors, shall we…? Hey, Carter, you've got long hair in that one… Oh there's me again, Christ, I certainly look pissed about something – Wave, Major, let's see if I wave back. Oops! No sense of humor…"

"Daniel?" 

He recalled himself to the question Jacob had asked. "Yes, we destroyed the information the other Teal'c had gathered for Apophis. No, I don't know whether it was a pyramid ship or a permanent base. I didn't see if there was a Stargate. There was a royal sarcophagus but it might not have been Apophis'. I'm sorry about the Tok'ra who died. There was nothing we could do for them…"

"Please, Carter, go back to that one…Yes, my SGC does have a sunken bath in the 'gateroom, why wouldn't it? And yes, it generally has attractive naked people washing each other's backs. Did I mention that I love coming into work? Damnit! You're a hard woman…"

"They made this guy a _colonel_?" Jack was positively glowering at his counterpart.

"He wouldn't be the first O'Neill to conceal his light under a bushel, Jack," Jacob said dryly. "And from what Daniel tells me, it sounds like he handles himself pretty well in the field."

Jack grunted something that sounded suspiciously like 'Humph'.

"That's it!" Abruptly the colonel sounded so much like their Jack at his most 'Air Force' that everyone stared at him.

The other Jack grimaced apologetically. "Okay. Maybe a very small part of me does actually want to go home." He looked at Sam, "Can you go back? It was right there. They must have taken the mirror through the gate and put it in my office. Kawalsky was biting his lip, Ferretti was looking anxious, and my version of you was looking at her watch and yawning, you can't miss it."

Hiding another smile, Sam turned the dial back. Static flickered across the screen and they all looked at it in surprise, then Sam's face cleared and she turned to address her teammates. "That must be the dimension your abductor came from. I think this proves the mirror was destroyed."

"That's good to know," Jack said quietly.

Sam turned the dial again and there were Kawalsky, Ferretti and another Sam all staring intently at the mirror. Daniel noticed that, despite the other Jack's words, the other Sam looked just as worried as the men did. He saw her mouthing the word 'Colonel?' anxiously.

"Hi, kids. Miss me?" He held up a hand in greeting. "Hope you were good while I was gone."

"Sir, you do know they can't actually hear you, don't you?" Sam gave him an amused look.

"Hey, I'm teaching them to lip read." He held out a hand for her to shake. "It's been a pleasure, Major. Thanks for all your help and I'll even listen to a whole explanation from my Carter out of gratitude."

"Thank you, sir. I'm sure she'll appreciate it."

Daniel hid a smile but then looked up to see their visitor beckoning to him. He went over as the man pulled the pack with the disks in it onto his back then addressed Jack over his shoulder. "It's been – weird, Colonel."

"Likewise, Colonel."

"But the rescue is much appreciated. Dying kind of sucks, and I hear there's nothing to do on a Friday night in Heaven."

Daniel blinked at him. "You think they'd let you into Heaven?"

"What, you think they wouldn't? Damn. I'd better make sure I don't die again then. If hell is anything like Netu I definitely think I'll pass." He held out a hand to Jacob, saying, "General. Always a pleasure, in any dimension. Give my regards to the Tok'ra."

"Will do, Colonel." Jacob looked only amused by this new O'Neill, Daniel was pleased to note. It only seemed to be Jack who thought he was taking a damned liberty every time he opened his mouth.

"Teal'c." He stretched out a hand to the Jaffa. "Pleasure to meet you. Less of a pleasure to meet the other you, I admit, but you are an entirely different matter. Consider me an admirer of your work." 

"It was a pleasure to meet you also, Colonel O'Neill." Teal'c shook his hand gravely. 

"I'll look out for you in my world. Got any hints for ways I could make you come over to our side?"

"Remind the Teal'c in your dimension that as long as he serves the Goa'uld his people will always be slaves."

"Will do." He nodded to Narim. "My greetings and thanks to the Tollan. I still think you could let us have an ion cannon or two but I'm not going to quibble about it here."

Narim inclined his head, hiding a smile. "You are welcome, Colonel. I am relieved to hear that you have also made contact with the Tollan of your world. And even more relieved that they are also not allowing you to share their technology."

"Some days you really have to hate these guys," the man observed.

From the mirror, Sam, Kawalsky and Ferretti were beckoning anxiously, clearly not sure what the hold-up was. Their CO sighed and turned to Daniel. "I guess this is goodbye."

"I guess so." Daniel felt a strange tightness in his chest. He really didn't want this Jack to go and yet there was no way for him to stay.

"See you around?"

Daniel nodded, trying to force his face into a smile as he did so, but he couldn't think of anything to say. This man leaving hurt and the thought of never seeing him again hurt unbearably.

"So long then, Doc."

Daniel moistened his lips. "So long, Colonel."

As the man reached out a hand for the mirror, Daniel was aware of Jack relaxing behind him while he felt as empty as a hollowed out egg. Suddenly a hand seized his and the other Jack said quickly, "I'm just borrowing him. You can have him right back when I'm done."

Before anyone could object, he touched the mirror and the blue light fizzled through both of them.

 

"Colonel!"

Daniel blinked in surprise as he found himself staring into the surprised blue eyes of a different Samantha Carter. He looked around the room in confusion, then looked back at the mirror. Sure enough, there in the glass was the Sam he knew staring at him open-mouthed.

"Captain." O'Neill nodded to his Sam then slapped Kawalsky on the shoulder. "Major." He grinned at the third member of his team. "Ferretti."

"You okay, Colonel? What happened after that Jaffa guy grabbed you?"

"I'm fine, and I'll tell you later. Right now, I'd like you all to meet Doctor Daniel Jackson, also of SG-1, and on a temporary visit from another dimension." He pulled Daniel forward, easing him away from the mirror. "This is actually the active combat Daniel Jackson but we're hoping to get our own model as soon as I put in an order with the manufacturers. Ours will probably be a slightly less advanced version but I hear they train up beautifully."

"Sir?" Sam was looking between them in confusion. Her hair was a little longer than the Sam Daniel knew and she had the rank of Captain, he noticed.

"In his world they went with the anthropologist on each team idea, Carter. I'm now a convert." He looked around at them all. "Doctor Jackson and I need to have a little…chat before he goes back to his dimension. Can you tell General Hammond I'll be along to the debriefing in five minutes?"

Kawalsky glanced between Daniel and O'Neill then gave Daniel a friendly but salacious wink. "Pleased to meet you, Doctor Jackson."

"Likewise, Kawalsky." Daniel couldn't help grinning back at him. He nodded politely to the Ferretti and Sam, who were staring at him with suspicion in the first instance and dawning realization in the second. Sam was having to put up a hand to hide a grin by the time she went through the doorway. As the door closed, Daniel gave his friendly abductor an enquiring look. "This is your idea of being discreet, is it?" He looked at his watch. "And 'five minutes'? I have to admit I'm a little disappointed in you, Colonel. I took you for a man with more stamina."

O'Neill looked at him in surprise. "Hey, even I am not quite so crass as to actually 'do' you in full view of your teammates. Not that it wouldn't be tempting, of course, especially if I could get to see the look on your O'Neill's face while I was doing it. That guy has _such_ a hard-on for you, and the tragic thing is he doesn't even know it."

"You just judge everyone by your own standards."

The man pulled off his jacket and tossed it onto a chair. "Well, when the guy is in fact _me_ I think that makes sense."

"So why did you bring me here?" Daniel looked around the room and was a little disconcerted to find how similar it was to Jack's office in his dimension.

"To say goodbye." The man looked across at the mirror then took Daniel's elbow and gently tugged him into a corner that was sheltered by a filing cabinet from any prying eyes. "Some things are better without an audience."

Daniel had to swallow as his mouth went suddenly dry. "We already said goodbye."

"Not properly."

"And by 'properly' you mean…?"

He put his hands lightly on Daniel's shoulders, that slow burn back in his brown eyes. "I mean this…"

Warm fingers lightly stroked the side of his face before tightening very gently in his hair, but this time the mouth didn't move in to claim his and those brown eyes looked straight into his, asking for his permission. O'Neill's expression told him very clearly that he wasn't going to kiss Daniel against his will this time. There was a second where time seemed to hang suspended. _An infinite number of variations diverging in every choice we make like forks in the road._ Daniel could actually see this road forking. There was the turn-off he had never been meant to take and never would have taken, never even thought of taking, if that other Teal'c hadn't pulled him from his own familiar world into that unsafe one. Back there was the road he was meant to be on and he wasn't sure he was ready to leave it yet.

On the other hand he saw no harm in a small detour.

Daniel gave a barely perceptible nod and O'Neill smiled. He leant forward, very slowly, and then brushed his lips across Daniel's so gently it didn't disturb the bite mark the other Teal'c had left. 

Long warm fingers furrowed through Daniel's hair, their grip tightening a little as he was pulled in for a deeper kiss. Opening his mouth to Jack O'Neill's tongue seemed like the most natural response in the world and Daniel no longer felt any wish to fight it. He'd spent his life talking and thinking too much and just for once he was going to switch off his logic circuits and put his brain in neutral. He'd just made a new rule: anything that happened in an another dimension didn't matter. He liked that rule and he was going to stick to it. And besides, his whole body felt as comfortable and relaxed in O'Neill's arms as though he was floating in a warm bath. As the man's fingers gently massaged his scalp, and a skilful tongue explored his mouth with increasing passion, Daniel closed his eyes and just let it happen.

 

"What the hell!" As O'Neill dived across the room it was Teal'c who caught him by the arm and held him back from touching the mirror.

"Damnit, Teal'c, that son-of-a-bitch just kidnapped Daniel!"

The Jaffa looked at the image on the mirror but did not slacken his grip on O'Neill's arm. "Daniel Jackson did not appear unwilling to accompany Colonel O'Neill to his dimension, and Colonel O'Neill did give us his reassurance that he would return Daniel Jackson to us very shortly."

"Sir, Teal'c's right. I think the Colonel just wanted to say goodbye to Daniel in his own universe instead of this one." Her gaze held his, her expression saying pointedly _Just like the other Samantha Carter wanted to say goodbye to you in hers…_ "They do seem to have gotten pretty close."

O'Neill looked back at the mirror and saw himself putting his hands on Daniel's shoulders. "Yeah, well that's too damned close for me."

Teal'c again pulled him away as he tried to get to the mirror, saying sternly, "But not, it seems, for Daniel Jackson, O'Neill. The decision is his, not yours." He cast an enquiring glance at Carter. "Do you not think we should give them their privacy, Major Carter?"

She nodded. "Yes. I don't dare switch off the mirror or we could lose that dimension, but there's no reason for us all to sit here and watch."

"Damnit, Carter, this guy is _me_!"

"But he's not you, sir. And there's no reason why he should have the same relationship with Daniel that you do. After all, the Samantha Carters and Colonel O'Neills we've encountered in other universes have a very different relationship from the one you and I have, or would ever want to have."

He knew that she, like him, was thinking of those other dimensions where apparently they were husband and wife. A part of him had been thinking of their way as the brave path; the unusual way to go, thought of those O'Neills and Carters as the ones with the courage to dare to love again; but now he thought about it, he realized how much more courageous her way was. They'd chosen to be astrophysicists who stayed at home while 'their man' went out into danger. Carter had chosen to put herself in danger rather than give up her dream. She hadn't settled for being someone who stayed where it was safe and worked on theories. She'd stepped through the 'gate with a gun in her hand; she'd shed blood; lost some of her own. She hadn't elected to wait and pray for the people she cared about to come back to her safely, she'd gone with them and watched their backs. He wondered how many other women there were in any profession who had managed to get a PhD in theoretical astrophysics while attaining the rank of Major at as young an age as the Sam Carter he knew.

He realized how lucky he was to have her as not just a 2IC but as a friend. As lucky as he was to have Daniel as a friend. They were both brilliant and beautiful, and had more integrity, loyalty and courage in their little fingers than most people had in their whole bodies. He was damned lucky to know them, he was luckier still to have them on his team, and he was luckiest of all that despite all the dumb things he'd said and done to both of them, they still gave him their friendship so wholeheartedly and without reservation.He met her gaze steadily and gave her a little smile to show her he knew what she was talking about. "You're right, Carter. What works for people from other dimensions, doesn't work for us. It's all…forks in the road, right?"

"That's right, sir. Like General Hammond once said, some lines aren't meant to be crossed."

He was still nodding as he glanced back at the mirror and saw what the other O'Neill was doing to Daniel. He thought he was out of sight but there was a picture behind his desk and the glass was showing exactly what was going on behind that filing cabinet. Anger, and something that if he hadn't known better he might have mistaken for jealousy, spiked through him. "And that's one of them! The son-of-a- _bitch_."

"Sir, I don't think Daniel's object – "

But he'd already yanked his arm free from Teal'c's grasp and slammed his hand onto the mirror. 

 

No one had affected him like this since Sha're had thrilled every atom in his body on Abydos with what had turned out to be her farewell kiss. He was drowning in a sea of Jack O'Neill and the water was simply wonderful. 

Daniel could feel the man's fingertips still gently carding through his hair as that clever tongue explored his mouth minutely, and the unexpectedly sensitive lips pressed themselves against his. Every now and then the man would pull back enough to let them both breathe before returning to the kiss with undimmed enthusiasm. Daniel was swaying, dizzy with it now but still wanting it to go on. He hadn't realized how desperately he had missed this; being kissed; being desired; just simply being touched. This wasn't love. Having been married to Sha're he knew the difference between mutual attraction and affection, and real love. But it came damned close. And it felt so good to have those warm moist lips brushing feather light kisses onto his; that tongue curling around his; sucking his tongue into the other man's mouth before dueling with it playfully. This was the kind of kiss that teased, aroused, and satisfied all at once.

Daniel was so lost in the moment he hardly knew where or who he was, so it came as a double shock when a hand closed on his arm and wrenched him out of it without any warning.

"That is _way_ more than enough with the goodbyes, Colonel."

As he was yanked out of the kiss and half way across the room, Daniel opened his eyes to find himself face to face with a very angry Jack O'Neill. "But, Jack – "

"I don't want to hear it."

Jack looked furious; mouth tight with anger, skin very white around the eyes. Fingers wrapped tightly around Daniel's arm, he was glaring at his doppelganger as though he would have liked to empty a round into him. His voice was clipped. "Say goodbye, Daniel."

Daniel looked across at the other Jack wistfully, still feeling the warm fingers in his hair, that skilful tongue exploring his mouth, those hard dry lips pressing against his. "Goodbye, Colonel."

"Bye, Doc." He said it with a sigh. "Take care of yourself. If you ever get bored with your own universe you know where to find me."

Jack made an inarticulate sound that bore an unnerving resemblance to a snarl then pulled Daniel the rest of the way across the room. "But, Jack, I – "

Jack's hand slapped down onto the mirror like it would have liked to be striking flesh and Daniel felt the blue light fizz through him again. When he opened his eyes, he was back on Tollana with everyone staring at him and Jack. Braced for their disapproval he was relieved to see that they seemed to be reserving that for Jack. Teal'c was looking down his nose at the man, as were Jacob and Sam. She darted Daniel a look full of sympathy before turning on Jack with a flash of anger in her blue eyes.

"Sir, I really think Daniel knows whether or not he wants to – "

"Don't want to hear it from you either, Carter." 

Daniel looked into the mirror and saw the other Jack standing on the other side of it. Daniel waved, sighing regretfully. "Bye, Colonel."

O'Neill also waved, no mockery in his eyes now, only sadness on his face.

Looking at him, a hole opened up inside Daniel that felt as though it could never be filled.

"Damnit!" Jack snatched up the remote and stabbed the first button he came to. The image faded and Daniel couldn't entirely repress a little gasp of regret as the other Jack disappeared into a blank screen.

"Sir!"

"O'Neill!"

"Christ, Jack, you really are a son-of-a-bitch sometimes, aren't you?"

Daniel had to swallow down the terrible sense of loss still hollowing him out before he could drag his gaze away from the blank mirror. Jack was standing there like a stag at bay, defiant and angry. His stance had 'I don't care' written all over it. He glared right back at them and said shortly, "The mission, for those of you with very short memories, was to get Daniel back. I got Daniel back. Now let's go home."

He turned on his heel and strode out of the room with his spine very straight, and indignation emanating from him like aftershave. 

"What the hell is biting him?" Jacob demanded of no one in particular.

Daniel felt Sam's fingers squeeze his arm gently. "Are you okay, Daniel?"

He collected himself and dredged up a smile. "I will be."

"I could find that dimension again if you want to talk to the other Colonel…?"

He shook his head. "Thanks, Sam, but what would be the point? In a way Jack was right. Once you've said 'goodbye' there's not really anything else left to do except leave." He made a better attempt at a smile, wanting to banish that anxiety from her eyes. "I really am glad to be home, you know. This is definitely the universe I want to be in."

"Are you sure?" It was Sam who asked it but he could see the same question mirrored in Teal'c's eyes.

Daniel thought of the room with the bloodied uniforms, the lipstick rolling across the table. "Yes. I'm certain. This is where I want to be, Sam. You're the people I want to be with."

She squeezed his arm again. "Glad to hear it."

"As am I, Daniel Jackson."

He touched Teal'c gently on the arm. He was never sure how well Teal'c understood him. He sometimes caught the Jaffa looking at him as though Daniel was a particularly difficult puzzle he was trying to solve, so perhaps Teal'c didn't know how completely Daniel trusted him. Or that it would take a lot more than one bad experience with one bad Teal'c to make him forget how good a man his friend was. Daniel made a mental note to make sure he joined Teal'c for meditation on a regular basis for the next few weeks.

"We'd better get Daniel to the Stargate before Colonel O'Neill pitches another hissy fit," Jacob put in. "And I need to tell the Tok'ra what happened to our operatives. Teal'c, can I have a word with you about the situation on Chulak…?"

Teal'c gave Daniel a last searching look and Daniel gave him a gentle pat on the chest. "I'm fine, Teal'c, you go ahead with Jacob." 

He pretended a deep interest in the bubbles in the pillars while Sam said goodbye to Narim. He didn't know if there was still any attraction on her side or not, but there was undoubtedly great affection for her on his part, one look at the Tollan told Daniel that. He thought of Martouf again and felt another pang of loss. The Tok'ra had taken his body away so quickly so they could study it, Sam had barely had a chance to say goodbye. It occurred to him what a terrible temptation that mirror could be if you let yourself start edging down that road. 

There might be dimensions where his parents were still alive but he was dead and he could have them come and join him. Universes where Charlie was still alive but Jack was dead and so father and son could find one another in different dimensions. Sha're. Kawalsky. Martouf. Rothman. All of them out there on other worlds, alive and well, but missing people who were alive and well in _this_ dimension. With enough time and patience you could mend every fractured relationship, get back every friend you'd ever lost, but where did you stop? If his parents hadn't died and his grandfather hadn't rejected him would he have ended up being recruited to the Stargate program in the first place? It was partly because he had appeared so utterly alone and friendless that Catherine had chosen him. And if Kawalsky had lived, would Daniel and Jack have ever achieved the depth of friendship they had? And Jack would never have gone through the Stargate in the first place if his son hadn't so recently killed himself. He and Daniel would never have met. Sometimes good things happened because of terrible events. They were all a product of their pasts, of their tragedies perhaps even more than their triumphs. Much as he might hate it, Sha're's death was a part of him, the loss of her now another dark thread in his personal tapestry. If he changed that he would undo something else. Yes, the mirror was a terrible temptation, but only if you let yourself start playing God with it. All the same, Daniel couldn't help but feel a little relieved it was staying on Tollana rather than coming back to the SGC with them. Recent events had taught him he was even less good at resisting temptation than he'd thought.

"Daniel?"

He turned around to find Sam waiting for him. As she looped her arm through his and led him gently towards the exit, he realized he probably looked a lot worse than he felt. His bruises would all be darkening up nicely now, giving him the appearance of someone who'd…well someone who'd gone ten rounds with Teal'c and lost.

"I was just thinking about all those permutations and combinations." As he explained, he thought again how lucky he was to be in a universe where he had Jack, Sam, and Teal'c for friends. He didn't know anyone else in the SGC except those three who would understand the temptation the mirror offered those who had suffered losses. Sam's mother would be out there somewhere too. He certainly knew how the loss of the woman who had given birth to you felt. It was another of those invisible threads that kept him linked to Sha're's son; a child with whom he had no possible biological connection and yet who felt like a part of him all the same.

"You're right." Sam nodded as they passed along a corridor in which weapons-disabling equipment glowed at them amicably. "As a method of trying to undo old wrongs and sorrows, the quantum mirror sounds like a very good way to drive yourself insane. Some things just aren't meant to be. Not in our universe anyway."

When she sighed, he knew she was thinking of Martouf. He wondered if her life was blighted by that loss. If Martouf had been the only guy for her and anyone she settled for now just second best, or if there was someone out there she just hadn't found yet. That was probably why it was a good idea not to be able to cross dimensions, because you just never knew what the future held in store for you in your own universe. Perhaps some losses were meant to be endured, some wrongs left forever unrighted. All the same, once you knew those other dimensions were out there, it was difficult not to wonder sometimes 'what if'. 

"Ready to go home, Daniel?"

He turned to find her looking at him anxiously and knew he was probably acting a little strange for a guy who had escaped from being trapped in another universe by the skin of his teeth. Perhaps she thought he was traumatized from almost being raped; from meeting a bad version of Teal'c; from seeing a Jack O'Neill killed right in front of him. Perhaps she was right. He was certainly feeling more than a little shaken up and his heart was still beating faster than it should have been – especially when he thought about that other Jack's mouth against his, that kiss. No one had kissed him like that since…Sha're. How ironic. He had been working alongside the world's equal best kisser for all these years and never even known it. And now he did know it. Or at least knew that in another dimension there was a Jack O'Neill with the power to make his heart go pitter-patter and his hormones get up and do a little dance. Unfortunately, the Jack O'Neill in his dimension hardly even saw him as a friend these days and there was no way back to that other universe and that other Jack O'Neill. Perhaps it was just as well. Perhaps some forks in the road weren't meant to be taken. 

He found a smile for Sam, who was looking at him anxiously now. He suspected his smile was a little sad and not quite meeting his eyes. There was an ache in his heart that wouldn't quite go away although he hoped that it would fade. Now, added to the feeling that his best friend wasn't his best friend any more and was never going to touch him with affection again, was the realization that his best friend might have a good reason for withdrawing from him. If not in this world then certainly in another dimension he had shown himself to be someone all too ready, willing, and able to develop an unseemly crush on a Jack O'Neill. Perhaps the resolutely heterosexual Jack O'Neill in his world was keeping his distance from the flaky affection-starved archaeologist for a very good reason. It didn't mean they couldn't work together, of course. The memory of that kiss would fade. He'd stop thinking about the way that Jack from another universe had looked at him with all that affection; eyes crinkling with it; so much warmth there; so much kindness. The Jack O'Neill he knew had come and found him, saved him, the way he so often did; done as much for friendship as any man could be expected to do. His was hardly a wretched life. He loved his work and he loved the people he worked with; and in their own way he did think that they loved him. That wasn't to be sneezed at – not even by a man with allergies.

He made a better job of the smile, linking Sam's arm through his and squeezing it gently. "Yes, Sam." And this time he meant it. "I'm ready to go home."

***

Doctor Daniel Jackson shifted uncomfortably again. This chair was hard, the corridor was surprisingly draughty for a place underground, and the Airman standing there with a gun was making him feel distinctly uneasy. He was also feeling more and more aware of the fact that he'd managed to put his boots onto the wrong feet. He thought about changing them over to the right feet but was too embarrassed to do so in front of the airman. He wished they'd given him a bit more time to get ready, as he was sure half of the paperwork they'd asked him to bring was still back in his tent. In fact he wished they hadn't come and plucked him from the desert at all. Perhaps that dig had been insignificant in the wider scheme of things, but it had been familiar, and completely free of big men with big guns.

He had no idea why he was here. No idea why the Air Force had invited him here and even less idea why he had consented to come. When a helicopter turned up in the middle of the night and men with automatic weapons came and roused you from your tent, you tended to go with them even when they told you it was purely voluntary, you could refuse if you wanted to. Now he wished he _had_ refused. Just because his career was in shreds and his theories about the pyramids being so much older than anyone realized were being treated as a joke, that didn't mean he had to sell out to the Government. He'd had a brilliant career ahead of him once, even if that road was now closed, there were still enough glittering fragments from old triumphs to get him something better than this….

He'd risen to his feet, determined to make a bolt for it, when the door in front of him opened and a tall man in uniform stepped out. "Doctor Jackson?"

Daniel hurriedly shifted his briefcase into his left hand to hold out his right and managed to fumble it. The briefcase hit the floor, spilling papers in a white tide across the corridor. He couldn't believe that at his age this stuff was still happening to him. Anyone who looked like a jock or an authority figure could clearly still play hell with his most basic hand to eye co-ordination. As he dropped to his knees and scrabbled for the papers, he was already flinching in anticipation of the man's contempt.

"Here, let me." The tall man knelt down next to him and handed him a sheaf of papers, then held out his hand. "And let's have another go at that introduction. Colonel Jack O'Neill."

Daniel looked up into amused but definitely kindly brown eyes. "Doctor Daniel Jackson." He held out his own hand tentatively and the man gave it a firm shake, fingers unexpectedly warm against Daniel's skin.

O'Neill looked about forty, with hair greying at the temples, cut up short at the sides but longer on top. He was almost unnecessarily handsome, something the uniform did nothing to disguise. There was an ease and an air about him which Daniel recognized at once: someone totally comfortable with his own body, someone with 20:20 vision who knew where his feet were at all times and consequently never tripped over them; who could handle himself in a fight and didn't need to swagger about it. Daniel recognized the type because it was one he'd always been aware of. These were the guys who'd never run in packs at high school or college; who'd always been the interesting loners everyone wanted to know. As opposed to the geeky outcasts no one wanted to know. They'd owned motorbikes when others were still borrowing their father's cars, taken drugs when everyone else was still experimenting with cigarettes, and had sex when others were still practicing their courting strategies by stealing their sister's bra and slipping it over a chair to better understand how to undo its straps in a hurry. 

Daniel hadn't even aspired to those dizzy heights, of course, while men like these had been as far removed from Daniel's ink-stained book-filled experiences as the Mongols were from the Maya. He had just preferred them to the jocks because they'd never picked on him. Of course, they'd probably only never done anything to him because he'd been such a tiny speck on their horizon that they'd never even known he existed, but he'd been grateful for their indifference all the same.

Daniel realized this was the first time someone like O'Neill had ever given him his full attention and it was an unnerving experience. The man was looking at him with such intensity, almost as if he already knew him, those brown eyes studying his face with a strange kind of…tenderness. There was the sort of warmth in his gaze you got from a relative. Well, other people got from relatives. It had been so long since Daniel had seen Nick he couldn't really remember how that relative thing went. As far as he recalled it seemed to have a lot to do with there being a big hole inside you which you kept hoping would be filled by a few kind words, some indication that you were loved after all, which you never got to hear.

While he'd been gaping at the man like a beached fish, O'Neill had collected up the scattered papers, shoved them into Daniel's briefcase, picked it up in a way that stopped the broken lock from spilling them again, put it back in Daniel's arms, and was now rising to his feet, a hand under Daniel's elbow effortlessly taking him with him. 

"I'm very grateful you took the time to come here, Doctor Jackson." 

Daniel found he had now been ushered into the man's office and pushed gently into a chair. He also seemed to be clutching his briefcase like it was a shield, although against what he couldn't decide. O'Neill sat on the desk in front of him and swung ridiculously long legs as he gazed at him for a moment. Then he leaned forward and plucked the briefcase from him, putting it down on the desk beside him. "You'll want coffee?"

A steaming mug was put into his hand before he'd finished nodding.

"I expect you're wondering why I wanted to see you?"

Daniel nodded again. "Yes. I – was a little surprised that you…" He had no idea how to finish that sentence.

Colonel O'Neill didn't seem to mind at all. He nodded as gravely as though Daniel had just said something that made sense. "I know, and I'm sorry for dragging you away from that dig, but I wanted to offer you a job."

"A job?"

"It's top secret so if I tell you about it and you don't want it you'll still have to promise not to tell anyone else. Okay?"

Daniel waited for the threat to follow, the one about how if he _did_ think about telling anyone else, the CIA, or the FBI, or someone even nastier would come and get him. When he looked up at O'Neill the man was just waiting politely for his response. "Don't you want me to…I mean, don't I have to sign…?"

"Your word's good enough for me. If you weren't a man of high principals you wouldn't be stuck in the academic equivalent of Siberia."

Daniel blinked at him in surprise. Something was seriously wrong with this picture. This O'Neill guy was just the type who ought to be regarding Daniel with unconcealed suspicion, not to mention contempt. Instead he was looking at Daniel as if he really…liked him.

"Do you want to hear about it?" O'Neill prompted.

Daniel looked around at the man's office, the gray walls, the citations or whatever those certificate things were on the wall. This was undoubtedly a military man's office. This was not the office of a man who ought to have any time at all for someone like himself. 

"Why did you pick me?" Daniel looked around the room again. None of this made any kind of sense and the only attribute he had that he could think of was that if he disappeared no one would notice.

"Long story." The man poured himself a cup of coffee from the jug on his desk. "Want to hear it?"

Daniel's curiosity was undoubtedly aroused now. "Okay."

O'Neill grinned at him, looking him right in the eye as he did so. "That's my boy." For a reason Daniel couldn't completely fathom, he found himself slightly short of breath. O'Neill took a swig of coffee then put down the mug. He gave Daniel another smile then said, "Okay, here goes. Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away…"

 

Daniel's head was spinning from so much new and impossible information but he was also feeling… He was almost afraid to say the word. It was a long time since he'd felt happy. And even longer since he'd felt as though he belonged anywhere. He'd managed to lose himself in archaeological digs and find at least a certain peace and contentment. But there hadn't been a real sense of belonging. This was the last place on Earth he'd ever expected to feel at home but it was creeping through him with each minute he spent in this USAF rabbit warren. It was almost as though he'd been here before.

Colonel O'Neill seemed to know without being told that Daniel needed a lot of coffee to wash down all this new and impossible information. He actually seemed to know an awful lot of things without being told. Daniel wasn't sure how to take O'Neill, if he was honest; the man was just so damned…nice to him. He even had a bag of Daniel's favorite chocolate walnut cookies in his desk drawer and shared them with Daniel while he was talking as though they'd done this a dozen times before. Despite the fact this man was all the things Daniel usually found intimidating: older than him, taller than him, probably the kind of guy who knew how to kill people with his bare hands, military in every way, Daniel found himself at ease with O'Neill in a way that took him completely by surprise.

After a couple of hours of telling him lots of things about the 'Stargate program' that were clearly so highly-classified Daniel suspected he would never be able to leave the building again, never mind the country, O'Neill said, "I'll get Carter to give you the guided tour. Fraiser doesn't like me, and you'll need to see the infirmary."

'Carter' turned out to be a tall and beautiful blonde woman who seemed to be a Doctor of something and a Captain of something else. She wasn't at all frightening either. She took him around the labs and pointed out their research facilities, told him about all the foibles of the people they were passing, insisted that the scary bald guy called General Hammond was really a 'teddy bear' and that he wasn't to mind Ferretti, the guy was just jealous. Of who or what he was jealous hadn't been made clear. She also introduced him to a petite and very attractive woman in a white coat whose lustrous brown eyes were in direct contrast to her no-nonsense attitude and crisp speech. "This is Doctor Janet Fraiser, Daniel. She takes care of us when we get injured."

"Not accident prone are you, Doctor Jackson?" Doctor Fraiser enquired.

Daniel looked around the infirmary open-mouthed. After years in places with poor medical facilities, it was a shock to his system to see so much equipment that was new, bright and shiny. He couldn't help thinking of how much good these medicines could do in some of the developing worlds he'd visited. He recalled himself to her question with an effort. "Um – no, Doctor. Not at all accident-prone. I've never even broken a toe, which is pretty unusual for an archaeologist. Most of us drop a rock on our feet at some point."

She nodded in satisfaction. "Keep that up and you'll soon be my favorite patient, Doctor."

He jumped when the alarm sounded. Someone announced: " _Off world activation! Off world activation!_ " It sounded alarming, important, and pretty exciting.  
 _  
_Captain Carter – she'd told him to call her 'Sam' but he didn't think he'd be able to do that – looked around at once. "It could be the Tok'ra."

Doctor Fraiser raised an eyebrow, a smile tugging at her mouth. "Martouf did say he'd drop by, didn't he? Something about a conference on Voresh he was going to fill us in on…?"

"I was _hoping_ it might be my father," Captain Carter returned, but although she was clearly trying to sound lofty, her grin was infectious. She whisked him back to Colonel O'Neill's office in double quick time, taking his hand as though it was the most natural thing in the world when he got a little confused about the green lines they were supposed to be following. In fact she treated him as if he was her younger brother and she'd always looked out for him when they traveled together. He felt so safe in her company he was almost embarrassed by it. She rapped on the door, said, "Here's Daniel back again, sir. I think it's the Tok'ra," then scooted off at a run.

O'Neill looked after her and shook his head before handing Daniel another mug of coffee. "Carter and Martouf are at that walking-around-it-like-it's-a-magic-carpet-and-they-don't-know-if-it's-going-to-fly stage of their relationship. I'm wishing they'd hurry up and take it into the bedroom so they'll stop being so damned starry-eyed with each other." 

Intrigued, Daniel asked about the 'Tok'ra' and O'Neill gave him an explanation of sorts but either he hadn't explained it very well or Daniel's brain had reached its capacity for new information that day because he couldn't really understand it. 

O'Neill shrugged. "Don't worry about it. You'll understand better when you meet Martouf and Jacob. I'll get them to do the glowing eyes thing for you. Makes it a lot easier to grasp once you've had Lantesh or Selmac bawling you out."

A dark-haired powerful-looking officer arrived half way through Colonel O'Neill's explanation of the differences between the Goa'uld and the Tok'ra ('Basically, they're a lot more like each other than the Tok'ra like to think, but it's probably not a good idea to tell _them_ that…') The newcomer acted as though he couldn't stay away any longer, sticking his head around the door to say, "Is he in? What did he say? Does he look like the other – ?" Noticing Daniel, he swallowed the end of his sentence. A second later he'd recovered and winked at Daniel as though there was a joke he was going to fill him in on later.

Daniel expected O'Neill to start barking lots of orders or complaining about protocol but he just said lazily, "Clear off, Kawalsky. Go find your own anthropologist."

The way Kawalsky still came into the room and held out his hand to Daniel made Daniel dart a nervous look at O'Neill. The man shrugged. "Well, we might as well get the introductions over and done with. This is Major Charles Kawalsky. He's the leader of SG-2, who are a bunch of lowlifes you should have nothing to do with. He hasn't got himself a linguist yet so he's on the prowl for one. But I saw you first so I get to keep you and he doesn't."

Daniel was a little surprised by O'Neill's choice of words. That 'get to keep you' had been a little…open to misinterpretation. He'd always thought military men were very hung up on things like that, but this particular military man didn't seem to be hung up on anything. In fact he was so laid back he was practically horizontal.

He liked Kawalsky a lot, the man had a directness and good humor which were very appealing, and if Colonel O'Neill hadn't been so easy going he might have been tempted by the offer the man made him to jump ship from SG-1 and come over to his team. It was very strange to find these hardass military types having a mock-argument about which one of them could have him. Daniel hadn't had people actually wanting him for anything in a long time.

"Kawalsky, suck it up: I saw him first, he likes me better than he likes you, and, I outrank you. Ergo: Daniel's mine."

It gave him the strangest sensation to hear O'Neill call him 'Daniel'. He looked up at him in shock and the man raised an eyebrow. "Sorry. I'll call you 'Doctor Jackson' if you like. It just takes longer to yell if you're in danger."

"It's fine, Colonel." Daniel answered quickly; still trying to deal with the way it had affected him to hear the man say his name. He supposed he just thought of Colonel O'Neill as the sort of man who would call him 'Jackson' or 'You there!' It seemed to put their relationship on a strangely intimate footing to have the man call him by his first name.

Kawalsky shrugged, patted Daniel on the shoulder, said: "Good to meet you…Doc-Daniel. Hope you're going to be joining us", then left them alone together.

Daniel ran a hand through his hair. Colonel O'Neill was looking at him again. He knew he was being silly but it made him feel – not exactly uncomfortable, just a little hot and bothered when the man looked at him like – that. It was the way the man was gazing at him as though he…mattered that was so disconcerting. As though he wanted to keep him safe. And yet as they'd only known each other for a few hours there was no reason for this man to mind if a piano dropped on Daniel's head tomorrow. If he hadn't known it was impossible he would have said O'Neill was a relative of his; some long-lost brother who hadn't got around to telling him about their family connection. 

Darting another quick glance at the man, Daniel realized for the first time that they _could_ be related. O'Neill was a couple of inches taller than he was and had brown eyes instead of blue – and it was odd because Daniel hadn't really noticed the color of anyone else's eyes today but he was very aware that O'Neill's were a rich dark brown and their expression was unexpectedly gentle – but they were of similar build and there were even similarities in their faces. Perhaps the man _was_ a long lost older brother Daniel had never realized he had and that was why he was being so kind to him?

Finding his voice with some difficulty, Daniel said, "I know you've explained about the Stargate and the other cultures you keep encountering, and I can see why you would find a linguist and an anthropologist useful. And, given that these – Ghould – you keep talking about have adopted the identities of our ancient Egyptian gods I can see that a specialist in Ancient Egyptian dialects would be of use as well. I'm just a little worried that…"

"You won't be able to cut it if we run into any trouble?"

He wondered how O'Neill had known that. But the man seemed to have the knack of anticipating all Daniel's most difficult questions; putting them into words for him so that Daniel didn't have to. "Yes. I don't even know how to fire a gun, Colonel, and I'm not sure that I want to learn. But I don't want to endanger you, or Captain Carter or – " he didn't know Ferretti's rank he realized and he knew he couldn't call him 'Mister' but it seemed rude to just refer to him by his surname, " – or anyone else," he finished lamely.

"That's not your job," O'Neill assured him at once. He leaned forward for extra emphasis. "Your job is to decipher, translate, interact, communicate – all that anthropological stuff. It's up to the rest of us to keep you safe while you're doing it. You can't let us down, you see. We can only let you down." O'Neill ran a hand through his greying hair and Daniel noticed all the different colors there were in it, fascinating as wolf fur. "I promise I'll do my best to keep you in one piece but I'm not going to lie to you. As I said before, this is dangerous work. You could get seriously hurt or seriously killed. And when we're out there you're going to have to trust me to take care of you. If you can't trust me, there's no point in you stepping through the 'gate." 

Daniel nodded. "I understand." He didn't really. He figured that 'stepping through the 'gate', like shaking hands with someone who had a 'symbiote' in his head, was one of those things you couldn't read up on, you just had to do, and he wasn't going to know if he could be a useful part of this team O'Neill kept talking about until he tried it. But what he did know was that he wanted to try it.

"I can give you some basic self-defense lessons, and Carter can take you down to the range and teach you how to use a sidearm well enough for you to get your certificate. You might want to get a haircut too."

It was the first 'military' thing the man had said to him and Daniel was surprised by how much it hurt. He darted him a reproachful glance while putting a hand up to his hair defensively. "Is that an Air Force requirement, Colonel O'Neill?"

The man held up his hands in supplication. "Hey, it's not policy or anything. You're a civilian. I just thought it would…suit you better short."

"I don't think it would." Daniel hadn't thought about his hairstyle in years. It had been like this for as long as he remembered. It kept the sun off the back of his neck when he was working on an excavation and his ears warm in the winter.

"You'd look great with short hair." O'Neill wrapped one of those strangely gentle smiles around his words as a softener. "Trust me."

For no reason that he could think of, Daniel found that he was blushing. He hastily dropped his gaze, looking at his feet as though they were fascinating. A plan which backfired when O'Neill appeared right in his line of vision and started matter-of-factly unlacing Daniel's boots. "You've got these on the wrong feet."

"It was the middle of the night in Egypt." He said it defensively but he'd been hoping the man hadn't noticed his boots. He didn't want O'Neill thinking he was an idiot. He didn't want him thinking… With a sense of surprised recognition, Daniel realized he already cared a lot about what O'Neill thought of him. 

He had no idea why he just sat there and let the man remove his boots. Then put his boots back on the right feet for him. He supposed it was just exhaustion. As O'Neill finished tying his laces for him, the man looked up at him. "So, Daniel, do you?"

There was that 'Daniel' again, and that weird little reaction he had when he heard it, sort of breathless but pleased. He had no idea what that was about. "Do I what?"

"Trust me?"

Daniel found himself staring into those eyes again and it was astonishing how familiar this man already seemed to him; like a missing piece in a puzzle that had just clicked into place. He was aware that his heart was beating too fast but there was no doubt about the emotion he was feeling as he realized he really was going to be a part of this secret team that went to other worlds. That he really was going to be part of something again. This was definitely how it felt to be happy. 

"Yes, Colonel." It was Daniel's turn to smile as he realized it was true. Looking into those eyes, he knew this man would keep him safe if he possibly could; that for whatever reason, Daniel Jackson mattered to him more than Daniel Jackson had mattered to anyone in much too long. "I do."

O'Neill held out a hand and grasped Daniel's, a smile lighting up his face as he said, "Welcome to SG-1, Doctor Jackson."

***


	2. The Other Daniel Jackson

Strange Interlude 

The only living life is in the past and future…  
the present is an interlude…strange interlude  
in which we call on past and future   
to bear witness we are living.  
Eugene O'Neill _Strange Interlude (1928)_ pt. 2, act 8

 

Revelation had come in the spokes of a lovingly preserved classic car; the threads of silver within a white rubber wheel on something finned and gleaming from the fifties whose name and make Jack would probably have known. Daniel couldn't even take a guess at what it might be, but seeing those spokes turning had brought it home to him how futile, as well as dangerous, his present 'mission' was. A roulette wheel, that was what the tire reminded him of; and in that instant he had realized he was wrong, and so also were Sam, Teal'c, and General Hammond. There were too many possibilities; too many forks in the road; too much data. Just like the way the ball dropped onto a number on the roulette wheel randomly, so he was dropping into worlds. And it was all governed by chance, not science. There was nothing to analyze, nothing which could be proven. Because seven black could still come up tomorrow even though it had already come up today, but that didn't mean the other numbers weren't out there, and just as valid; the ball just hadn't dropped on them while he was looking.

How could they know if the sampling they had was representative? They couldn't. There wasn't time to gather enough because a lifetime probably wouldn't be enough. They were dealing with infinity here. If he visited eleven other dimensions while Jack thought he was on a dig with SG-6, and brought home all the information so that Sam could feed it into her computer, the only thing he would know for sure that he had achieved was a tacit lie to his best friend. A lie in which he had made others be complicit. 

So, in seven universes, Apophis had attacked the Earth, and in four he hadn't. Was that a representative sampling, or, if Daniel had visited eleven different universes would that sampling have been reversed? Nothing he was bringing back carried any certainty except that Jack would eventually find out and be hurt and angry and not trust him again. The reason why this mission was doomed to failure was becoming increasingly obvious to him with each trip. Because his reasons for embarking on it in the first place had been dishonest.

However often he told himself that they were doing as they had done with the world of the visiting Doctor Carter and Kawalsky, his conscience jibbed at him. They were interfering with other cultures for personal gain and with no idea of the future consequences of their interference.

Hammond had been an easy sell. Both Hammonds in fact. The one in the other dimension and Daniel's own favorite general. They both saw it as a way to painlessly combine and disseminate information gathered on missions made by SG teams. They saw it as means of preventing good men and women from dying unnecessarily because of a lack of pooled information. They were team players – that was why they were in the military; they saw this mission as a way of expanding the team.

Sam had been the easiest sell of all, of course. The idea to let Doctor Carter's dimension know about the Asgard so they could make contact was one she had heartily approved of. She didn't think this was any different. 

The plan, as Daniel had pitched it, first to her, and then with her help, to Hammond, had been simple enough. They made up a dossier of information of all the worlds they had visited and what they had discovered there. Allies they had made; ways they had made contact; planets to avoid; artifacts not, on any account, to touch. Many men and women in the SGC had died over the years. Perhaps in other dimensions those missions hadn't happened yet and could be averted. What if the other SGCs could be reached? What if they could be warned about Apophis? Warned about nanocytes and Ree'tu and fascinating spheres that could spread disease throughout the world if interfered with and not pacified in time? Told that the Tok'ra weren't the Goa'uld and they could be trusted, at least up to a point, and the same went for the Tollan, the Asgard, and the Nox. And what if this dimension could gain in return the benefits of their experience? Information about worlds this SGC hadn't visited yet but another SGC might have done. They had saved the people of Doctor Carter's world by putting them in touch with the Asgard. Perhaps they could do as much good as that elsewhere…? Perhaps out there somewhere another SG-1 had already narrowly averted death by a means they might not think of unless someone tipped them the wink.

At the time, it really had felt as if all he wanted to do was help save lives. A way to bring good out of bad and replicate what the Apophis from the other dimension had been doing with the help of that brutal Teal'c, but for a good reason; a positive pooling of useful information. Jack had been away when the idea had come to him; leading SG-3 on a return mission to a friendly world while their CO recuperated in the infirmary. Daniel liked to think that was the only reason why Jack hadn't been involved from the start; that there had been no subterfuge on his part. Then, of course, there had been that coincidental contact from the Jack of the other dimension. Even as he and Sam had been trying to sell Hammond on the idea of an inter-dimensional fact finding mission and been told that wonderful as their idea was, greatly as he approved of it and would do his best to sell it to the Pentagon, he just didn't think he would be given the extra resources to fund it, a message had come through from Tollana saying that they had a visitor for the SGC.

Colonel O'Neill had thought of the same idea as Daniel had; something he insisted, with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place on a pirate hero from a nineteen forties Technicolor swashbuckler, was the proof that they were soulmates. His Hammond had agreed two weeks before. He had permission to dimension hop with his team in tow and make first contact with other SGCs. What was more, he'd tried it once and he'd really liked it. Another grin and a look at Daniel that made a strange warmth spread through him. They'd done some good. Saved an SGC team from visiting a world that in their dimension at least had been blighted by an undetectable plague. The thing was, his Hammond wanted a two-pronged contact. A first mission to find out if the world was one they wanted to interact with; to see if the other SGC would play ball. Then, all going well and contact being made, a presentation to the SGC teams in the visited dimension to run through the dangers they had encountered and allies they had made. 

O'Neill had gotten to thinking that two heads were always better than one; that he wanted to share whatever he learned with their dimension and wondered if they wanted 'in' to the sum of a dossier of their own experiences to give to the other worlds, so those new worlds got two SGC histories for the price of one, and, by the way, could he borrow Doctor Jackson? His Carter was happy to do the powerpoint presentation in the afternoon about science stuff and the Tok'ra but it would be good to have an anthropologist to do the morning session about the significance of the temples they'd wandered past, the artifacts they'd dropped on their feet, that kind of thing. They had a Daniel Jackson of their own now, and they were delighted with him, but he hadn't been on a mission yet. They were still training him. The Daniel Jackson on this world was the one with the active combat experience, so, could he borrow him, please sir, if he promised to return him in the condition in which he'd found him? His dimension would take on all the expenses and organization involved in this little entente cordiale and their dimension could have all the information gathered by it if they just chipped in with a dossier of information and the loan of their anthropologist.

Hammond had agreed. He'd even beamed as he did so, and Daniel had felt that strange excitement creeping up his spine and making his heart go pitter-patter that he hadn't felt in much too long. It was more than a little exhilarating to be in a room with someone who wanted him; who was positively scheming to seduce him, and letting him know with little glances and grins as he did so exactly what he was about. He didn't exactly assist in the scheming; only subconsciously had he even thought that this new shiny plan of his might be a way for him to see the-man-who-wasn't-Jack again, although, if he was honest, in the back of his mind he had been thinking for a few days that he could have offered to share some of the information so gleaned with their newfound ally on that other world; but he hadn't mentioned to anyone that part of the reason why Colonel O'Neill was now asking for his assistance was because Colonel O'Neill was planning to get him into bed. Nor had he felt it necessary to mention that this Daniel Jackson wasn't really planning any great resistance to the not-Jack's plan.

And then the first trip out had been such a triumph. The kind where he had woken up for nights afterwards sweating at the thought of what would have happened if they hadn't gone. It had been so strange to look into the eyes of another Jack O'Neill. This one had looked tired and lined around the eyes, unable to meet his gaze. He had seen that look and known at once that the Daniel Jackson on this world was dead. He had been wrong.

This third O'Neill wasn't too good about giving out information but the Samantha Carter there had been more helpful. No, their Daniel wasn't dead. Their Daniel had…had a little breakdown. He had developed schizophrenia as a result of 'gate travel and he was still confined to a mental facility. They could only log so many hours of travel now and they had frequent psych evaluations to check for signs of incipient instability. Daniel had spoken so fast even the other Carter hadn't got what he was saying, but the O'Neill there had; he'd grabbed him by the shirt and yanked Daniel close enough for him to see right into his eyes.

"Not. Schizophrenia?"

"It's a Goa'uld-killing device, invented by Machello. It's what killed the Linvris. When there isn't a Goa'uld inside the subject it causes symptoms similar to paranoid schizophrenia." He had never understood completely what it was Sam had done with her blood that day, but all the notes on it had been in the dossier he was carrying. The Janet and Sam on that world had snatched it out of his hands so fast he'd had paper cuts. Giving thanks for the protein marker Jolinar had left inside her, the Sam of that world had given up a blood sample gladly and their Janet had done whatever needed to be done to it to make it safe to inject. Then there had been the drive across town at a speed that had made his hair stand on end. The Jack O'Neill on that world driving with his knuckles white on the wheel, jaw set, eyes fixed. Even Daniel hadn't been able to guess what he was thinking. It was only later the man had told him he'd been thinking about killing Mackenzie. The only way to bear the red traffic lights, the stinking polluted traffic crawl that made 'rush hour' such a contradiction in terms, had been to imagine the gray puff of brain tissue as he jammed a gun in the man's mouth and pulled the trigger. Daniel had been relieved that his own Jack either didn't think like that or didn't choose to share those thoughts with him.

They had arrived just at tranquilizing time and even after all this time Daniel had flinched from the sight of the needle, from the muscular goons getting ready to hold the patient down. The grim-faced O'Neill had seen him flinch and had knocked the tray of neat instruments out of the nurse's hand before yelling at Mackenzie in a way that brooked no argument to open the fucking door, right now. That was when Daniel had seen himself as his friends must have seen him once; a gibbering ghost in the corner, haunted by imaginary footsteps. Seen also the raw guilt washing across a Jack O'Neill's face because he had stopped visiting. Even though he was the one this wreck of a Daniel always asked for and listened for and hoped to see; because he couldn't take seeing it any more; being a witness to the tattered remnants of a once healthy mind. Janet had injected the results of her and Sam's blood centrifuging experiment and the Goa'uld killer inside the white-clad Daniel had been persuaded that its job was finally done; the enemy destroyed. It had died and slipped from his ear in a thin white ooze, and the lost Daniel had come back to them; clarity returning moment by moment as the drugs receded.

"Jack…?"

"I'm here and I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry."

Daniel had watched this other Jack hugging an other Daniel, whispering reassurances into his bewildered ear, and had felt at once enormous relief and enormous loss, because he had gone so far past the point where the Jack he knew would ever embrace him like that. How long was it since they'd touched? He'd grown up too fast; moved too far from the naïve innocent Jack had once thought of him as; done something, at any rate, to make Jack feel he wasn't to be embraced any more. Even as he watched them with tears in his eyes of relief that this Daniel had been delivered from his nightmare, he had felt a cold emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Standing there watching them he had caught himself trying to imagine what those arms felt like, what it felt like to have that abrasive hint of stubble just touching his skin, the warmth of the man's lean muscular body enfolding him so completely; his scent. He'd almost forgotten Jack's scent.

"After all these months, he's going to need therapy. I propose that we move him to a hospital bed and gradually begin the process of reintroducing him to the outside –"

The look the strange Jack had given Mackenzie had made even Daniel's blood run cold. The man had taken off his jacket and wrapped it around the pajama-clad Daniel who was still clinging to him, saying quietly but in a way only a man with a deathwish would have argued with: "He's coming home with us."

So he, by his inter-dimensional intervention, had delivered another Daniel Jackson from evil; from insanity and captivity, back to reason and freedom. A triumph, a veritable triumph. But that night back on his own world he had bought himself a bottle of whiskey and sat there drinking it in dry-eyed misery, all the while trying to remember how it felt to have a Jack O'Neill put his arms around him.

Hammond had been delighted by the dossier Daniel had brought back. One unvisited world had been locked out of the system; another 'gate address added that a different SG-7 had found inscribed in a temple somewhere. A part of it had still felt wrong though; as if he was doing something illicit. He didn't know what 'Colonel O'Neill' – as he kept trying to think of him – had said to Hammond but somehow he had managed to persuade him to keep Jack out of the picture. He imagined there had been that disarming frankness brought into play; the man telling Hammond Colonel O'Neill just didn't like him; they hadn't hit it off; it would bother him to know Daniel was dimension-hopping without him and as there was no possible room for him in this mission, why tell him something that would only drive him nuts, especially when he was off-world and to be honest it was none of his business anyway? Maybe he had said other things. Maybe he had ventured where no one in this dimension dared to tread. Whatever he had said, it had evidently been convincing, and, much against his better judgment, Hammond had not informed Jack of what was going on. Daniel hadn't told him either. He'd wanted to. Had thought about just dropping it casually into the conversation as soon as Jack came back. But the man was away so it was easy not to tell him and by the time he came back Daniel had good reason not to want him to know what was going on.

Because by then, of course, what was happening was exactly what Jack's alter ego wanted to be happening. Colonel O'Neill visited the other dimensions during the week, took the initial risk, the dangerous plunge into the unknown, explained the situation, and found out whether or not these other-universe SGCs wanted to pool information across the dimensions. If the answer was 'yes', Captain Carter and Daniel got to pay their visit and make their presentation. Daniel's lecture was always shorter, the morning session, the archaeological, anthropological, cultural, and linguistic information about significant worlds visited, significant things learned. By lunchtime he was done and there was nothing left to do but wait for Captain Carter to give her own lecture and then answer a thousand questions from eager beaver scientists who wanted to know everything she knew. He'd assumed that he and the colonel would wait around in the visiting SGC for Captain Carter to finish. He'd assumed wrong. 

"Let's take a look round."

That was all the man had said, and it seemed innocuous enough. Then he'd driven them straight to a motel in which he already had a booking. They bought wine and Chinese food on the way and ate it in a bedroom with paper on which pale flowers were perpetually climbing the walls. Except Daniel had found he was too nervous to eat more than a few bites so had just drunk instead; something the man with Jack's face had been more than happy to encourage. Given the wine, and given the circumstances, proximity, and history between them, what had ensued had probably been inevitable. 

Afterwards, they'd driven back in silence. Even on that first drive he'd realized this was an impossible task they had set themselves. It would take someone working full time for a year to visit enough parallel planes to come up with anything like a representative sampling. There was a whole I Ching of other universes out there and this haphazard half-hearted under-budgeted initiative was not going to provide anything like enough permutations and combinations to be worth the computer feed they produced. And, anyway, this was interference. They were dabbling in places they probably literally weren't meant to go. So the doubts had been there from the beginning. If it hadn't been for the Colonel Jack O'Neill whose hair had yet to be turned gray by the stresses of 'gate travel, he would probably have called a halt straight away; or at least when Jack had finally come back from that damned mission. 

He still blamed Jack for being away so long. Three weeks could be an eternity sometimes. If Jack had been around in the SGC, he wouldn't have been able to lie to him, and he probably wouldn't have been able to embark on this affair. It would have been too weird to talk to the Jack he knew and then go and have sex with the Jack he was sleeping with, and Jack would have worked out that something was up straight away and asked a whole lot of questions and probably have found a way to stop it happening. Jack had a knack of stopping Daniel's relationships happening. Women who got a little friendly with him in the canteen tended to get a gimlet stare and suddenly find themselves urgently needing to be elsewhere. Jack hadn't shown his particularly warm and fuzzy side to Hathor or Ke'ra either. He could never talk about Shyla without sneering. He never mentioned Sha're unless Daniel mentioned her first, and even when Daniel did get up the courage to talk about her, Jack always tried to change the subject as soon as possible. He liked Daniel single. That seemed to be as far as he had thought about it. Beyond that, Daniel suspected he never had and never would go, but there was something there that certainly felt like jealousy, and Jack was never happier than when Daniel was dateless on a Friday night and forced to watch hockey on Jack's couch instead of in bed with some girl. Men as possible lovers had never been discussed, even obliquely. Daniel's heterosexuality had been assumed by everyone – not least by Daniel himself. He had been married to a woman: that made him straight. Yeah, right. Tell that to Oscar Wilde. The fact Daniel had been as guilty as anyone of making such a simplistic and adolescent assumption didn't prevent him from feeling irritated with Jack for doing the same thing. He was sleeping with a man, damnit. Jack had gone off and left him just when he had needed him the most and now he was dimension-hopping twice weekly to lecture in the mornings and writhe naked on an impersonal motel bed in the afternoons. And all the while he knew that it was wrong; not the sex, but the mission. The sex was only wrong because it was making him continue with the mission long after he had stopped believing in the morality of what they were doing. 

Oh yes, and wrong because when Jack found out about it – and find out about it he inevitably would – he was probably going to kill someone.

***

Jack O'Neill couldn't prove it but he'd suspected for a while now that things were being kept from him. On the rare occasions in the past when he was off world and the rest of his team weren't, if the guy wasn't in the infirmary wired up to machines that went 'beep', Daniel tried to be there for the check-ins. Even the ones at 2am. This time out Daniel had only been there to talk to him half the time, and whenever O'Neill had asked him how things were going at his end, he'd refused to make eye contact across the galaxies and muttered something about artifacts. Daniel was a crappy liar. Always had been. Probably always would be. O'Neill knew nothing had happened to Teal'c or Carter because they had been there for a few check-ins as well, although he'd started to wonder if they weren't also avoiding his eye. Even Hammond had seemed a little uncomfortable to him. 

His first thought had been that Daniel was having an affair, then he had realized how absurd that was – to imagine that Daniel being in a relationship was something anyone would think had to be kept from him. He had never minded Daniel having a girlfriend as long as Daniel chose wisely. Daniel was just so damned useless about choosing wisely. Hormonal princesses, amnesiac destroyers of worlds, women who got turned into Goa'uld, lousy choices every single time, with the exception of Sha're – although if he was honest he had a problem with Daniel's marriage to Sha're too. Not that he would ever tell the guy that, but he didn't think a good way to meet women was to have them turn up in your bedroom, take off all their clothes, and then tell you that you were married to them now. So, it wasn't that he had any objection to Daniel having a girlfriend per se; he just had an objection to all the girlfriends Daniel had chosen so far. He had thought about picking out a girl for Daniel himself and sending him off on a date, but he just hadn't come across anyone yet who seemed suitable. There was always something about them that struck him as a bit flaky or needy or aggressive that rendered them not the right choice. God, he hoped Daniel hadn't met some girl on Death Row and was just waiting for O'Neill to come back so he could explain to him that although they had found all those castrated corpses in Billie-Mae's basement, no one had ever actually _proven_ she was the one who had killed and skinned them, and anyway in some cultures devouring your victims' liver would actually be taken as a sign of respect….

Then it had occurred to him that perhaps something had happened to Sara. But when he'd finally got hold of Daniel at oh dark hundred when there seemed no logical reason why the guy shouldn't be asleep, and had asked point blank if his ex-wife was okay, Daniel had blinked at him in confusion and said he didn't know but he was sure they could find out. Did O'Neill want him to do some checking? Not Sara then. But still Daniel had seemed jumpy and elusive. O'Neill had given him a lecture on drinking too much coffee and not getting his beauty sleep, telling him frankly that he looked like crap. The look Daniel had given him then had made him regret his words, he had seemed so hurt by a throwaway phrase.

"Tired," he amended quickly. "You look tired, Daniel. Go and get some sleep. The artifacts can wait until morning."

He had seen an expression of pure guilt wash over Daniel's face. The guy had looked close to tears and his soft, "Take care of yourself, Jack" had sounded full of remorse. O'Neill wondered if he had some dread illness no one wanted to tell him about, but when he asked to talk to Fraiser on the next check-in she was as brisk and matter-of-fact as always. He'd examined her through the flickering video-link and could see no sign of subterfuge on her face. Satisfied that whatever was weirding out his teammates it wasn't a tumor no one was telling him about, he had given her a lecture to pass onto Daniel about eating and sleeping regularly. She had sighed and said, "He's not a child, Colonel." There had been an emphasis to what she said, a kind of mingled reproach and warning at once that had made him suspicious all over again.

"I know. But he has no more sense than a kid sometimes and I expect you to take my place bullying him into eating and sleeping while I'm not there to do it myself. You can share the burden with Carter if you want to or sic Teal'c on him, just make sure he looks after himself. He looks like crap."

"I hope you don't tell him that." Her brown eyes had been hard to read. "Sometimes even men like to hear something nice about themselves."

Unexpectedly he'd found himself on the defensive. "Guys don't go around paying each other compliments, Doctor."

"Perhaps they should." The look she had given him had seemed to be telling him a lot of things but he hadn't understood what they were. "Perhaps sometimes if people don't get any kindness from the people they need it from the most they go and look for it elsewhere."

After that conversation he'd wondered if any of their allies had been trying to recruit Daniel. He could just imagine the Nox turning up and asking Daniel if he wanted to spend some time in their invisible city. Or the Tollan offering to show him all the technology they had that wasn't actually useful for anything. What if Daniel was ill and his only chance of recovery was to become a Tok'ra? His mind had whirled with possibilities for three weeks while he held erratic unsatisfactory conversations with Daniel through a flickering MALP and felt the anxiety grow day by day. In the back of his mind there had been a growing suspicion that Daniel _was_ having an affair with someone no one would want to tell him about, and for the very good reason that he would go ballistic if he found out it was true – but in his heart he knew that suspicion was absurd. The one person he absolutely could not bear it to be he knew it couldn't be, because, given how much it cost, there was no way in hell that Hammond was going to let Daniel dial up the 'gate so he could go dimension-hopping. That other O'Neill had been a threat to their friendship, yes; he had come horning in where he wasn't wanted, and he had taken liberties no one had the right to take with Daniel when Daniel was vulnerable and confused. But he was also safely trapped in a completely different universe. No. Whatever was making Daniel so twitchy had to be something else. But, however many times he told himself that, the suspicion didn't entirely go away. By ten days into the mission he was counting the days until he could get back to the SGC and ask Daniel what the hell was up with him and then start helping him fix it.

On his return, Daniel had been waiting, but although he'd been there in body, in the 'gateroom, large as life and twice as natural, it had felt as if he was only half there in spirit. On an impulse O'Neill had hugged him and ruffled his hair and when he'd looked at Daniel's face his expression had silenced him halfway through a sentence – tears in his eyes and that stricken look. It had mattered way too much that O'Neill had hugged him, and for some reason left Daniel lacerated with guilt. For the next few days O'Neill had been like a terrier worrying at a bone, dogging Daniel's steps, visiting him in his office, peering intently at whatever he was working on, while Daniel kept refusing to make eye contact with him and dropping his pens and spilling his coffee and saying that he was busy, really busy, Jack, with an edge to his voice that spoke of rising panic; as if he was scared to be left alone in a room with him these days. O'Neill had retreated, brooding and baffled, torn between thinking that Daniel had fallen in love, not with some ax murderer, but with him, and was afraid he'd find out about it, or was on the point of quitting the SGC. The first solution to the weird behavior was fine, not a problem, something they could work around no trouble at all; a good thing, in fact, as it would stop Daniel straying, and as Daniel had the _worst_ taste in people to get involved with that could only be a positive modification on his previously unsatisfactory romantic behavior. The second solution was unacceptable on every level and had to be headed off at the pass somehow. He had waited impatiently for Teal'c or Carter to come and find him and tell him what was going on or for Daniel to seek him out himself and spill his guts. But the days had crawled past and it still hadn't happened.

He'd walk into a room and the conversation would stop. His best friend was not only not seeking him out in the way he'd done in the past, at times he seemed to be actively avoiding him. He was convinced that Teal'c knew a lot more than he was telling. Carter as well. Even Doc Fraiser seemed to be in on it. On really bad days, he could convince himself that everyone in the whole damned SGC knew what was going on except him.

Today was the day when he'd decided to get some answers out of someone. In fact round about now, dragging Daniel down to a storeroom, tying him to a chair and telling him he had ways of making him talk was looking good to him. He was fed up with being kept in the dark. Unfortunately Daniel was hiding in plain sight and he couldn't get to him.

As today was Saturday there was no reason for Daniel to be in the SGC. Or Carter either. Or him, of course, but he was here because they were here. Right now he was sitting in the briefing room watching the seventh chevron engage. He didn't usually memorize Stargate addresses but he'd taken the precaution of looking this one up first because he'd begun to suspect this might be where Daniel was heading. It didn't come under his 'worst fear' scenario because that would have involved Daniel becoming a Goa'uld or getting some dire illness, but it came first in his 'most likely to piss me off' category. Daniel had _better_ not be doing what he now suspected he was doing or heads really were going to roll and Daniel's was going to be first into the basket.

Tollana. Daniel, waved off by Carter and Teal'c, was 'gateing to Tollana with a dossier clutched in his hands, and evidently with General Hammond's blessing as he was down there in the 'gateroom talking to them. But no one had told him. He'd been back for a week, in which he'd been catching up on paperwork, hanging around the SGC, and generally doing the boring stuff the Air Force insisted they all had to do in between killing snakes. Plenty of time to share any confidences if they'd wanted to, but, no, not a word. The others had waved him goodbye on Friday evening as though they were all going to be meeting up for Monday morning's briefing but they'd obviously had this planned for a while. For all he knew they'd been doing this every weekend while he'd been away….

He gritted his teeth. People could tell him what they liked but he knew now this had something to do with the quantum mirror. Daniel was doing something sneaky with alternate universes, probably with Narim's assistance. Possibly with the help of the Tok'ra as well. His pointed exclusion might be down to the Tok'ra. Perhaps they'd decided he was too rude to work with them any more. Or…

Or it had something to do with that bastard other O'Neill. Teal'c and Carter had both made it clear their sympathies were with Daniel on this one. They thought he had no right to interfere when a guy Daniel had known for a few hours took advantage of Daniel being confused and shaken up after damned near being raped by someone who looked like his friend. Not to mention dazed, exhausted, traumatized, and, according to Janet Fraiser, slightly concussed. Daniel had been in no condition to make his own decisions and that had been obvious, so excuse _him_ for playing the heavy older brother. And the really annoying thing was that Daniel had only let that guy kiss him, and Teal'c and Carter were only standing up for the son-of-a-bitch, because he was _him_. That guy was reaping the benefit of being Jack O'Neill because of all the groundwork _he'd_ put in. 

Not that he particularly wanted to kiss Daniel himself anyway, but that wasn't the point. The point was that if he _had_ wanted to kiss Daniel, he'd earned the right. That other O'Neill hadn't earned the right to do more than…shake hands with Daniel. At the most.

O'Neill watched Daniel step into the event horizon and vanish into the flickering blue light. Then he strode down into the 'gateroom to tell General George Hammond what he thought about his team keeping secrets from their leader.

***

Daniel couldn't help thinking there was a terrible irony here somewhere. He was using a Stargate and two quantum mirrors to travel to a motel room only a few miles from Cheyenne Mountain. It was a little like taking Concorde to cross a duck pond. He guessed that was just one of the many troubles you encountered when you embarked on a relationship with someone from a different dimension. He wasn't needed today. This SGC was only interested in the accumulation of technology, not the anthropological data. It always made him uneasy when all the world they visited cared about was where the weapons were stashed; what was the 'gate address to reach the allies with ion cannons and tel'taks. So, there was no reason for him to be here at all. But he hadn't told Hammond that. Or Sam. Or Narim. He'd left at the same time as usual, even though he knew very well that all he would be collecting was a dossier of information and nothing else and Kawalsky could have thrown that through the mirror to them. But him not having to lecture in the morning meant he and Colonel O'Neill had a whole day together and that was the real reason why he was here. Full of doubt and bad conscience and a growing unease about the morality of what they were doing by not letting other dimensions make their own – possibly useful – mistakes, but here all the same.

"Hello, Doc." Kawalsky gave him his usual dirty grin and even dirtier wink. "The Colonel's just having lunch with the brass. He said you can join them if you want to or…" Seeing the face Daniel pulled, he shook his head. "Or you can wait and he'll be as quick as he can."

Despite the man's habit of looking Daniel up and down and leering at him, Daniel couldn't help liking Kawalsky. There was something about his energy and honesty that he'd always responded to. And although the man was an unlikely Cupid he'd also proven himself resourceful and determined about getting Daniel to the various dimensions over the past few weeks. "Hello, Major. I think I'll skip lunch if that's okay."

"So, Doc," Kawalsky jingled the car keys in his pants pocket suggestively, "have you thought any more about that threesome idea I had?"

"Why don't you ask the Daniel in your own dimension?" Daniel enquired as he stepped away from the mirror.

Kawalsky looked genuinely shocked. "Daniel doesn't know about things like _that_."

"Why not? He's a cultural expert, isn't he?"

Kawalsky sniffed in disapproval then handed him a coat. "Wrap up warm, it's chilly where we're going. Apparently in this universe they only just got the Touchstone back to the right planet and they're still getting snowstorms in Colorado."

"Has Colonel O'Neill sent his report back?" Daniel reluctantly pushed his arms into the coat. Kawalsky was always wrapping him in mufflers and overcoats which it would take him ten minutes to get out of at the other end. He suspected Colonel O'Neill had rather overdone the 'Take care of my anthropologist or else' routine.

"Here." Kawalsky slipped the disk into Daniel's pocket. "You're not on the Stargate program on this one and they're having problems with Apophis. The Colonel has given them the gate address to reach the Asgard, and told them to get in touch with you pronto. Always supposing you're still alive, of course. You were dead in the last three. Talk about accident-prone…"

"Those universes got blasted by Apophis. I don't think me getting killed by a death glider attack counts as being 'accident prone'."

"Come on, in one of them you'd had a pyramid collapse on you! Those things have stayed upright for four thousand years and you managed to find one that fell on your head? How klutzy is that?"

"Stayed upright for _ten_ thousand years as I tried to tell my colleagues back in the – Oh never mind."

Kawalsky wrapped a scarf around Daniel's neck as though he was a six year old. Daniel thought resignedly that the real surprise was that this coat didn't have mittens attached to it tied together by a piece of elastic. In a tone a mother might use to enquire about schoolbooks, Kawalsky said, "Have you got that information pack from your General Hammond?"

Daniel looked down at the blue folder he was carrying. "Yes, but I'm still not sure we should be interfering with these other universes in any case…"

It was a familiar argument and Kawalsky put his own views robustly as he fiddled with the dial on the mirror. They had been through this a number of times before. Two General Hammonds had agreed to it. Colonel O'Neill was happy to take the risk. Some Earths which would have been overwhelmed by Apophis might now be saved and so on, but Daniel still felt they were interfering with things they didn't really understand. He was annoyed with himself for having suggested it in the first place. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, certainly, and he'd been pleased when the General Hammond from his dimension had given him the go ahead to try it out. Now he was worried that his primary motivation had always been his desire to see the other Jack again. 

"But how long does he plan to keep doing this?"

Kawalsky shrugged. "You know the Colonel, Doc. As long as it takes."

"But what if we're actually making things worse in those dimensions? We don't know…"

"Ah hah!" Kawalsky held up a finger. "Look, Doc, no offense but talking to you about anything at all always gives me a headache. Personally, I like the idea of having allies in different dimensions and I like the idea of Apophis getting his ass kicked in as many worlds as possible, but in the end if the Colonel thinks it's a good idea and General Hammond's given it the green light, that's good enough for me. And, you know, if you'd ever got your handsome head around the idea of chain of command, it would be good enough for you too."

Daniel gave him a withering look. "You know all this unquestioning hero worship is very bad for – Colonel O'Neill."

Kawalsky smirked at him. "You call him that when you're in bed together?"

"None of your business. And for your information I'm here as cultural attaché from our dimension to yours. My meetings with Colonel O'Neill are strictly business." Daniel's mouth twitched as he said it but he did manage to get to the end of the sentence without actually smirking.

"Yeah, right. I'm convinced. But, hey if you want to see real hero worship you ought to see Daniel with him. Our Daniel I mean." Kawalsky had that fond expression on his face he got when talking about the other Daniel which Daniel was starting to find deeply irritating. "It's kind of sweet, to be honest. And the Colonel's like a different guy when he's with him."

_As opposed to how he is with cynical old me, I suppose?_

__There were days when Daniel felt an unworthy desire to kick his alternate universe counterpart in the butt. He was getting a little tired of hearing how sweet and good and innocent Daniel Jackson Mark Two was. He was starting to wish that Daniel Jackson Mark Two would wise up and realize Jack O'Neill was just a guy like any other, with definite faults who made definite mistakes some times.

Kawalsky was still talking as he searched for the right dimension on the quantum mirror. "…and you ought to see General Hammond with that kid. Talk about doting. Daniel's got the guy wrapped around his little finger and the cute thing is he doesn't even know it. It's like Daniel's the favorite grandson the general never had..."

Daniel pulled a face at Kawalsky's back. He was getting seriously fed up with this Everybody Loves Our Daniel speech. Not to mention the way they talked about the other Daniel as though he was twelve years old when he and that Daniel were the same age. The guy was clearly seriously clueless and Daniel thought he was giving Daniel Jacksons the universe over a bad image.

"…those negotiations were getting nowhere until Daniel stepped in. He had that guy eating out of his hand in about five minutes flat. I swear when he looks at you out of those big blue eyes of his you just find yourself wanting to give him whatever he wants. Your last Snickers bar. An Alliance against the Goa'uld. World Peace…"

_Yeah, yeah, whatever!_ Daniel interrupted shortly: "So they know I'm coming?"

"Relax, Doc, I told you, the Colonel's already cleared it. They're expecting you and your dossier and there's going to be car waiting so the Colonel can drive you out to where you can get your…soil samples."

"Do you _have_ to say it like that?"

"Well, seeing as how the last I heard you were collecting a completely different kind of deposit…"

Daniel shook his head. "Kawalsky, five minutes conversation with you and I need to take a shower."

Kawalsky gave him an appreciative grin. "Don't let me stop you. Need someone to soap your back for you?"

"Do you talk to the Daniel in your dimension like this?"

Kawalsky looked shocked to the core. "Of course not. If any son-of-a-bitch tried coming onto Daniel the Colonel would rip his head off. And I'd be helping him. Christ, if anyone so much as thought about _looking_ at Daniel like that, I think the Colonel would – "

"Do the words 'double standard' mean anything to you, Major?"

"Take it as a compliment, Doc. Our Daniel's sweeter but you're definitely hotter. And here we go. This is the place." Kawalsky nodded at the mirror.

A few seconds later Daniel was in the 'gateroom of yet another dimension. 

***

"Colonel O'Neill!"

O'Neill had been only halfway through his rant but he'd had to pause for breath, giving General Hammond a chance to finally get a word in.

Hammond pointed at the chair and said incisively, "Sit _down_ , Jack."

O'Neill dropped into a chair, still glaring. 

"I agreed to this mission after consultation with Doctor Jackson, Major Carter, Teal'c, the Tollan, and the Tok'ra. Doctor Jackson specifically requested that you not be informed as he felt you would object to the mission because of your personal animosity towards the Colonel O'Neill from the other universe."

"Oh he did, did he?"

"The fact you just called the Colonel O'Neill from the other universe a – " Hammond glanced down at his notebook, "'low down sneaking piece of scum who deserves to be castrated with a blunt pair of shears' does add some weight to Doctor Jackson's argument."

O'Neill glowered horribly. "Daniel is on my team. He has no right going off on missions that don't have my agreement. It undermines my authority and it's bad for morale."

"Whose morale, Colonel?" 

"Mine, damnit!"

"I consulted with my counterpart in the other universe and I met the Colonel O'Neill from that dimension. He gave me his personal assurance that Doctor Jackson would be under his protection while working as a cultural attaché in the other dimension."

" 'Under his protection'?" O'Neill shook his head in disbelief. "General, when Daniel was angling for this damned assignment did he or Carter or Teal'c happen to mention that the other O'Neill _kissed_ Daniel right in front of the rest of us?"

Hammond looked at him for a long moment before saying. "Well, he wouldn't be the first member of this facility to be kissed by someone from a different dimension in front of his teammates now would he, Jack?"

The unfairness of it really stung. _I only let that other Carter kiss me so she'd realize I wasn't the Jack O'Neill she was missing. I was trying to help out a friend, damnit. All that son-of-a-bitch is trying to do is help himself to some naked Daniel._

__Hammond continued evenly, "Since working on this program I've learned that the usual rule book doesn't cover some of the things we come up against when we're dealing with different worlds and different dimensions. I've implemented a few rules of thumb for myself, for instance, some of which you've been glad of yourself in the past. Such as the fact a member of the SGC can't be court-martialed for anything he or she might do while under the influence of alien technology. I've recently introduced a new one which I explained to Doctor Jackson before he embarked on this mission: anything done in a different dimension has no bearing on what happens in this one."

"So you're also saying ours is the only reality of consequence?"

"I'm saying that anything Doctor Jackson chooses to do or not do while he is liaising with a completely different Colonel O'Neill who is under the command of a completely different General Hammond is none of my damned business. I don't happen to think it's any of yours either."

O'Neill got to his feet and leaned across the desk. "Well, I'm sorry, General, but I disagree. I'm team leader of SG-1. As long as Daniel's a member of SG-1 that means he's my responsibility and I have a right to know where he is and what he's doing."

"He's doing this in his own time, Jack, which means it's nothing to do with you. Unless you think it's your God-given right as his CO to monitor his behavior when he's home for the weekend."

"But he isn't home for the weekend! He's stepping through the gate. That means he's representing the SGC."

"And as commander in chief of the SGC I am very happy for Doctor Jackson to represent this facility in a different dimension gathering and disseminating information that will help destroy the Goa'uld, and I'm also grateful to him for giving up his free time to strengthen bonds with possible allies."

" 'Strengthen bonds with possible allies'?" O'Neill echoed in disbelief. "That other O'Neill didn't ask Daniel over to his dimension to show him his stamp collection, General!"

"Jack, maybe we should sit down and identify the problem here. Are you angry because a member of your team is currently on a mission for which your approval wasn't sought? Or are you angry because your friend didn't tell you what he was choosing to do with his time off? Or are you just angry because Doctor Jackson seems to prefer the company of a different Jack O'Neill to yours at the moment? Because if it's the latter, that's something you're going to have to take up with Doctor Jackson yourself."

O'Neill thought for a minute. There were a lot of angry retorts he was itching to make, but he wasn't angry with Hammond and they both knew it. He was angry with Daniel, himself, and that bastard O'Neill. He was also angry with everyone who had assisted Daniel in getting to spend time with the other O'Neill but it was still a lesser consideration. The main consideration was that he needed to be where Daniel was, right now, and he needed to stop Daniel from doing something he might regret. Or if Daniel had already done it, he needed to make damned sure he started regretting it and didn't stop until _this_ Jack O'Neill told him he could. He stood up straight and said, "Permission to follow Daniel to the other universe, General. I promise not to cause any trouble. I just need to be a part of this operation."

He was sure Hammond was going to refuse. The only thing he had on his side was the fact Hammond clearly hadn't liked the rest of his team going behind his back. He wasn't sure that was going to be enough. But after a long pause, Hammond nodded. "Permission granted, Colonel. But I expect you to conduct yourself in a manner appropriate to someone representing the SGC."

_I bet you didn't give Daniel that speech!_ Aloud O'Neill said only, "Yes, sir. That's understood."

"And before you do or say anything hasty, I also want you to think about the reasons Doctor Jackson might have had for wanting you kept out of this."

As O'Neill put his hand on the door, Hammond added quietly. "You haven't asked me why I agreed to it."

O'Neill looked at him in surprise. "No, sir. I presume you thought it would useful to the SGC."

"I did. In fact I think it would be invaluable and it's already done a lot of good elsewhere and given us a lot of data it might have cost us good men and women to obtain. But I also agreed to it because I wanted Doctor Jackson to have a reason to come back to this dimension. The other SGC were very keen to keep him. It was just our good luck that there turned out to be a Daniel Jackson alive in their universe as well. In the last three he and Colonel O'Neill visited he's been dead each time. If Doctor Jackson had been dead in the universe that other Jack O'Neill came from, I think he might seriously have thought about staying there. You might want to think about why he would do something like that, Jack. You also might want to think about how you're going to act when you see him."

"I wasn't planning to storm over there and drag him back by the scruff of the neck," O'Neill protested. _Not this time.  
_  
Hammond gave him a straight look. "I'm very relieved to hear it, Colonel."

"Daniel's a big boy, he can make his own decisions. I know that." O'Neill realized he hadn't sounded too convincing. Probably because he didn't think Daniel ought to make his own decisions. He thought he should run them by his good friend Jack first and then do what Jack damned well told him. 

"I'm relieved to hear that too, Colonel. That means there's going to be at least one thing upon which you and Doctor Jackson are going to be in complete agreement." As O'Neill headed for the door, Hammond said firmly, "I'm trusting you, Jack. Don't let me down."

Although the injustice of it stung like a hornet, O'Neill bit down any retort. Once he was through the mirror he reserved the right to deck that other O'Neill and shake Daniel until his teeth rattled. Until then he was going to at least pretend to be reasonable about this. "Yes, sir," he said crisply. "Understood." Then he was out of the door and striding towards the 'gateroom while he mentally rehearsed all the things he was going to say to Carter and Teal'c when he caught up with them.

***

Sitting on the edge of the double bed in the motel room, Daniel rubbed his hair with the towel then leaned across to accept the mug of coffee O'Neill handed him. He couldn't help feeling there was some significance in the fact that even after twelve weeks of clandestine meetings he still thought of this man by his surname or as the 'other' Jack. Jack was still 'Jack'. He suspected he always would be. Embedded too damned deep for anyone else to make a comparable impact. 

At the moment O'Neill, like Daniel, was wearing only a toweling robe and his hair was damp from the shower. A shower they'd taken together, something Daniel was still getting used to: the idea that he was now someone who took showers with another man on a regular basis. The bed was rumpled from earlier where they'd set a new personal record on how long it took them to get from 'Hey, you' to 'Oh God yes!' Something that hadn't done a lot to ease Daniel's misgivings about their relationship.

He supposed the entropic cascade problem did add to their perennial sense of urgency. The laws of physics dictated that they could literally never have more than a dirty weekend together before Daniel's corporeal integrity started to break down; the Daniel of this dimension the most effective barrier in the world to them ever having more than these swift and furtive couplings. Just by living in this dimension, he literally had the power to rip them apart. 

In their case the laws of physics were a blessing as well as a curse, because Daniel had long suspected that a dirty weekend would represent the full limit of the time they could spend with one another before they grew bored. The way things were, O'Neill could kick Daniel back through the 'gate after a couple of hours of sweaty coupling and make it appear self-sacrificing and chivalrous; not wanting to risk Daniel getting a case of the entropic jitters through being in a dimension already occupied by another version of himself. Daniel also always had the perfect reason to take his leave as soon as he liked after the sex without looking like a user. All the same, he suspected they both felt more relief then regret that there was such an insurmountable barrier to their ever embarking on a real relationship and of that he did feel a little ashamed.

The man was talking about the Daniel from his dimension. Again. On the last visit there had been all that one-sided musing about that Daniel's oh-so-tragic childhood; how heartbreaking it was to read through his personnel file and see all the foster parents that had sent him back to the orphanage because of the nightmares, the bedwetting, the crying. O'Neill's brow darkened dramatically as he revealed that the social worker had suspected physical abuse from at least one of them and emotional abuse from others. How his college psych reports had spoken about an intellect so much in advance of his emotional and physical maturity that tutors were asked to remember that just because he reasoned like an adult it didn't mean he should be treated like one. His mind was brilliant, the report had said, but inside he was just a very vulnerable much-rejected teenager who was as innocent in some areas as he was well-informed in others.

Daniel had gritted his teeth over that, hoping to hell it didn't have crap like that on _his_ personnel file. He knew his childhood could read like a soap opera but he had at least had just the one set of foster parents, and although they had died when he was still a teenager he had been able to take refuge in his early admission to college, not to mention his studies, and his books. He really hated listening to the whole Little Orphan Danny saga as told by a third party. It was all he could do not to get out an imaginary violin and start sawing.

Today at least O'Neill was only talking about how wonderful, marvelous and _special_ his Daniel was about getting through to other cultures. Only by an act of great self-restraint had this Daniel managed to stop himself from asking if this was 'special' as in 'came in on the special bus', because the way O'Neill talked about the other Daniel some days it seemed more appropriate.

"…Don't know what the hell we would have done without him on that last mission. He just seems to have this knack of getting people to like him. He doesn't even know he's doing it. Daniel genuinely thinks there's good in everyone and…"

It was very strange to sit there and hear another version of himself praised. Particularly as the other Daniel was being praised by a man this Daniel had just had sex with. Twice. The weirdest thing was his lack of jealousy. Surely he ought to be eaten up with it by now? He was in a relationship with this man, after all. He was dimension jumping just to be with him for a few hours of illicit passion in a seedy motel room. 

It had been going on for weeks now while O'Neill tracked down a Daniel Jackson of his own, inducted him into the SGC, and then started taking him on missions in which the guy was apparently winning friends for himself and the SGC all over the galaxy. That Daniel Jackson had been an invisible extra for two-thirds of an affair conducted in different versions of the same shabby chalets; the same wallpaper; the same carpets; even the same bedspreads. O'Neill got to visit the worlds he visited, but all Daniel ever got to see was the inside of the SGC as he gave his lecture, the inside of the jeep Kawalsky borrowed to drive him to the rendezvous, and then the inside of a bedroom. So, it clearly wasn't the scenery which kept luring him back. And even though he would have liked it to be otherwise, it wasn't the information he was handed on the other worlds which drew him either. It was the man sitting on the bed beside him, damp, warm and tousled from the shower. The man still talking about somebody else. 

Daniel took another sip of coffee and listened to a little more of it.

"…he just won't quit it. If he thinks he's right or it's the right thing to do or doing something else is the wrong thing to do, he just digs his damned toes in and it doesn't matter if you yell at him, or you bring in a five star General and have him yell at him, Daniel still won't give in. I still can't get used to that. He looks so young and – defenseless and he hates arguments, but he's got this titanium core. There are days when I want to swat him round the head with something heavy, and there are other days when I just sit there in awe of his certainties…"

Sometimes O'Neill almost got close to poetry when he was talking about his Daniel.

Daniel winced then. That was the truth after all; to this Jack O'Neill _he_ was the 'other' Daniel. When he thought of 'his' Daniel he thought of a man Daniel had never met and with whom this Jack had never had sex. 

Daniel stole a look at the man again. He was certainly very physically similar to the Jack O'Neill he'd known for the past four years. And he was easier going in lots of ways. Less moody. More patient. Easier to get along with. Easier to be with. But –

There were so many 'but's. This man looked like Jack acted like Jack, walked like Jack, talked like Jack, but his and Daniel's shared experiences were minimal compared with what he and Jack had been through. He knew things about this Jack he never would and never could know about the Jack he knew best. O'Neill mattered to him, certainly. And he found him attractive and fun to be with. The man had always represented temptation to Daniel. He could be someone else when he was with him. He could experiment with him. He had let this man explore every inch of his naked body and kiss trails from his toes to the top of his head. After some initial misgivings, he'd enjoyed having sex with O'Neill, somewhat to his surprise. He'd taken showers with him; shared a bed with him; done things he wasn't even sure how to spell with him. But despite all those orgasms they'd shared, Daniel still felt closer to the Jack he'd never kissed than this one. He cared for O'Neill deeply but he _loved_ his own Jack. 

Of course he wasn't sure yet what kind of love it was. Perhaps it was just an even stronger version of the love he felt for Sam and Teal'c: people who had become so important to him they were like parts of his own body. Unattached limbs which couldn't be bruised or bloodied without sending a corresponding stab of pain into him. He had a feeling he didn't necessarily need romantic love from Jack; that he never had done. O'Neill had offered him something his own Jack hadn't and although what this man was offering wasn't strictly what he wanted, he'd accepted it anyway. But it was still a poor substitute.

He'd run off to play with this guy just to prove that he could, but perhaps all he'd ever really wanted was the proof that his best friend was still his best friend and still cared about him as much as he had in the past. With a creeping sense of embarrassment, Daniel was starting to suspect that his having an inter-dimensional affair with O'Neill had just been a way of getting Jack's attention. As that made him feel about as well-adjusted as a six year old, he _really_ hoped that wasn't the true reason he was sitting on this bed with another man in a bathrobe, damp body still tingling from all those kisses. But there had to be a reason why he was still feeling so unsatisfied. It certainly wasn't the sex. The sex was…Well, he was no expert, but it felt damned good to him. 

He'd enjoyed being wooed; enjoyed being seduced; enjoyed having someone else buy the wine and light the candles; enjoyed having someone make it clear how much he wanted Daniel naked and in his bed. And he'd enjoyed having someone make him take a completely different approach to sex from anything he'd ever tried before. It was as if he'd owned a deck of cards for twenty years but only known you could play solitaire and hearts with it; then someone had come along and introduced him to five-card stud. He wasn't even certain if he liked five-card stud better than hearts, but learning the new rules had still been pretty damned exciting.

But there was also a sneaking suspicion this affair might have been a novelty which was starting to wear off. He liked the man immensely and their relationship was something uncomplicated and fun in a life in which Daniel had very few things that could be said to come under those categories. But it wasn't really in him to continue with a relationship that was never going to turn into love, and he had a feeling that if it had been about to, it would have done so by now. Being with O'Neill definitely filled a lot of holes (and he had better not use that analogy with Kawalsky or the guy wouldn't stop sniggering for a month) but it didn't fill the one inside him the withdrawal of Jack's affection had left. It seemed to be a depressing truth that all the wild monkey sex in the world with a dashing, charming, 'wrong' Jack, didn't compensate this Daniel Jackson for a few pats on the arm and hair ruffles from a cranky, unreasonable 'right' Jack.

That was damned annoying and it made him want to kick the Jack he knew, hard. How dare the son-of-a-bitch still have so much power over Daniel that even when Daniel was still tingling all over from two terrific climaxes with this Jack and was intending to try to squeeze in at least one more before leaving, he was _still_ thinking more about his friend than his lover?

Daniel looked at O'Neill over the rim of his mug as he sipped the hot strong brew. The toweling robe had come undone and Daniel could see droplets of water glistening on the man's chest hair. He'd caught himself looking at this man's body a few times and trying to compare it with Jack's body. O'Neill had a scar across his ribs which he was pretty sure Jack didn't. And O'Neill didn't have the scar on his right leg Jack had gotten in Netu. O'Neill had been whacked around the head with a staff weapon instead. He had a bump on his scalp as a result. On their first night together he'd taken Daniel's fingers and rubbed them across the place so he could feel the raised skin of the scar tissue. It was something Jack would never have let him do. Daniel always felt awkward about touching Jack, afraid the man would tell him to get his hands off, or cut it out, or stop fussing, for crying out loud, Daniel! O'Neill positively encouraged touching. He was so uncomplicated compared with Jack that it felt like being on vacation every time Daniel was with him. Except sometimes he found himself missing even those complications…

He'd been thinking for a while that he needed to call a halt to this relationship, but when he was here with O'Neill he found himself thinking he'd just put it off until next time. The sex was so good, and it wasn't as though the man had ever asked for anything more. Not since the beginning anyway. There had been a few awkward conversations the first couple of times when he had tried to coax Daniel into telling him how he felt about him, but since then he hadn't really discussed the relationship. They talked about their missions and compared notes on the planets they visited. Then they had sex. Then they talked some more. Then they usually had sex again. 

It had been Daniel's decision to try to keep things 'businesslike' between them. No soppy stuff. Just good clean fun with no strings attached. He didn't know if he'd hurt the man's feelings or not with that proviso. He'd used Sha're as an excuse, saying it felt weird enough to be helping him to cheat on the woman Daniel loved, he could only go through with it if he had his assurance he wouldn't let it affect his marriage. But the truth was he knew this relationship had no future. This was an interlude which had already lasted longer than Daniel had expected. Maybe today really was the day when he ought to tell O'Neill they shouldn't see each other any more.

Realizing he hadn't been listening to the man for a while now, Daniel guiltily tuned him back in.

"…can't seem to make him understand I'm not the guy he thinks I am. Daniel sees me as this…" The man shrugged helplessly. "Someone I'm not."

Daniel was surprised by the depth of feeling in his voice. "But you'd like to be." 

The man looked at him with a hint of defiance. "Sometimes, when Daniel looks at me like…that, yes I would. I'd like to be this brave, decent guy who will always be there for him. I'd like to be someone who does what he does for all the right reasons and none of the wrong ones. I'd like to be the hero he thinks I am."

"You are a hero, Colonel." Daniel said it quietly. "You're out there every day risking your life to save your planet from the Goa'uld. By anyone's definition I'd say that makes you a hero."

"But we both know that's only part of the picture, Doc."

Daniel shrugged. "So he has a bit of a hero-worship problem. He'll get over it. I did."

"But I don't want him to." The man ran a hand through his hair. "I don't suppose your O'Neill wanted you to see him for who he really is either."

Daniel blinked in surprise. "I don't think he wanted me to put him on a pedestal. I'm presuming it gets kind of drafty up there?"

"Actually the view's pretty good." He sighed and took a sip of his coffee. "I just – I wish – "

"What?" Daniel said it quietly, but he could feel the misgivings tightening in his stomach.

"Wish I was good enough for him, I suppose."

Daniel looked at wistful expression on O'Neill's face and felt as though someone had slapped him. Despite his earlier decision to call a halt to this relationship it still hurt to realize he'd been supplanted. "You're in love with him." He tried to make his tone neutral but it came out with a surprised hint of accusation.

The man winced but he didn't deny it. "He doesn't see me that way."

"Well, no, as he's near-sighted and he's got you up there with the Statue of Liberty, you're probably pretty much of a blur to him right now. Why don't you try stepping down from that pedestal and telling him how you feel, Colonel?"

He'd tried to call the man 'Jack' he really had, but he just couldn't. Jack was 'Jack'. This man wasn't Jack. He'd felt uncomfortable when the man tried to call him 'Daniel' too and in the end they'd reverted to their original names for each other. 

"Because I don't know how I feel. I don't know what I want from him. I just know I want to keep him safe and that it would kill me if any harm came to him."

Daniel moistened his lips. "He's a member of a first contact team. Harm is going to come to him. You can't protect him from everything. You can't ask that of yourself."

The man looked at him in exasperation. "Have you ever asked your O'Neill how he feels about you getting hurt?"

Daniel blinked. "I don't get hurt very often. Pain is one of those things I generally tend to avoid."

"How many times have you been ribbon-deviced?"

Daniel pulled his robe around himself. He didn't want to have some deep philosophical discussion. He just wanted them to go back to bed for an hour and forget everything else in one of those whiteouts of ecstasy this man was so good at providing. "A few too many."

"I bet your O'Neill knows how many times it's happened."

"I doubt it. Math isn't one of Jack's strong points." Daniel moistened his lips. "Do you want to have a – relationship with the Daniel in your dimension?"

"I don't know." O'Neill shrugged and ran a hand through his damp hair. "I just – I want him to go on liking me as much as he does at the moment. I want him to go on thinking I'm the man he thinks I am. I want to _be_ what he thinks I am. He sees so much good in me, Doc."

Daniel swallowed hard, still a little surprised by how much it hurt to learn that he'd been supplanted in this dimension as well as his own. He'd been very secure about this relationship. It was one of the few where he'd been in control of it almost from the beginning; he was the one making the ground rules; the one who hadn't allowed his emotions to become too involved. "I don't think he's seeing anything that isn't there."

"Doc, don't take this the wrong way. I think you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. I still can't believe you ever agreed to let me…" He grimaced apologetically, "you know…"

"I know," Daniel said dryly.

"But you're not in love with me and you're never going to be, and I'm old enough and insecure enough to need the person I'm sleeping with to think I'm the cat's pajamas. I know it's shallow of me, but like I told you on our first meeting I never claimed to be deep."

Daniel tried not to make it too obvious that he was feeling as though he'd been slapped. "Are you dumping me, Colonel?"

O'Neill pulled a face. "No! I'm just saying we maybe need to…"

"Stop seeing each other?"

The man reached out and cupped Daniel's face in his right hand, stroking his thumb gently across Daniel's cheekbone. "You've been comparing me your Jack O'Neill since the day we first met, and the truth is that fond as you are of me, you think he's the better man. I'm not saying you're not right, you probably are, but as long as he's around I'm always going to seem like second best to you."

"Jack and I are just friends," he said quickly.

O'Neill pressed his lips very gently to Daniel's before drawing back and saying quietly, "Perhaps that's the problem. You and me never really got a chance to be friends. My fault. I put the moves on you thirty seconds after you opened your eyes in that dungeon. And when we came here that first time we both knew it wasn't going to be for conversation. I don't regret anything we've done together but I do regret never even trying to find out what kind of friends we might have made." He carded his fingers gently through Daniel's hair as he leaned his forehead against Daniel's. "I wanted to see you naked. I wanted to get you into bed and keep you there until the sun came up. Now we could go back to basics and start trying to get to know one another but I don't think that's what either of us want."

Daniel pulled back so he could look the man in the eye. "What do you think we want?"

"I think you want the me in your dimension to love you, and I think I want the you in my dimension to love me. I think we're seeing each other out of mutual cowardice because it doesn't matter to us that much if we screw up this relationship, and while we have this we don't have to deal with the relationship in our own world."

"So you are in love with him?" It hurt far more than he'd anticipated.

"To be honest with you, I have no idea. I don't think about seeing him naked, the way I do with you. I don't dream about making love to him, the way I do with you. I just wake up every morning and he's the first thing I think about. I drive to work and the whole way there I'm looking forward to seeing him. The first thing I do when I get to Cheyenne Mountain is go and find Daniel. I sit in his office for hours sometimes when he's fiddling around with those damned artifacts or translations and I'm not even bored because I'm in a room with him. When we go on a mission I'm aware of him all the time, where he is, where the danger might be. Every time he does anything a little dangerous it takes every bit of self-control I have not to yell at him because I just can't bear the thought of him coming to any harm. Sometimes I yell at him anyway, and when he looks hurt because I bawled him out it's like someone stuck a knife in my ribs..." He glanced sideways at Daniel and gave him a weary smile. "Well, those are my symptoms. What's your diagnosis, Doc?"

Daniel sighed, put his mug on the floor, then lay back on the bed. "That we'd better have some break-up sex while we still can because this is the last time you or I are going to be getting any in a _long_ time."

"Damn. I was afraid you'd say that." O'Neill groaned and lay down next to him. They rolled onto their sides and gazed at each other. The older man looked at him with regretful admiration. "I just can't see you without getting…involved with you. I don't think any Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson in any dimension are meant to be casual buddyfucks. You and me we're meant to be…intense."

Daniel sighed. "I know."

"What about you and your O'Neill?"

Daniel grimaced. "Oh, we've always been intense."

"Do you – want to sleep with him?"

Daniel was surprised by that catch in the man's voice and turned his head to look at him. It occurred to him that they were both lying on a bed dressed only in their robes. They might be breaking up but the heat between them was undiminished. "What I want – need from Jack is so complicated I don't even know what it is. I don't think about him naked though, if that's what you're asking. Probably because I've seen him naked so many times I've never really thought about it."

"What do you think about when you think of him then?"

_I think about him asking me if I'm okay. I think about the comfort I used to take from his touch, his voice, his reassurance, his praise. I think about us working together to save Skaara from Klorel in the Triad, how right that felt, how in tune we were. I think about how much I miss him._

__"That guy is such an idiot."

Daniel blinked in surprise as he realized he hadn't answered the question but O'Neill had clearly read his reply in his face. The man reached out and stroked the back of his fingers gently up Daniel's cheek. 

Daniel swallowed. "He's done a lot for me over the years. He's helped me through some bad times when I really wasn't a very nice person to know. Jack's had to be the father, brother, and best friend I never had to a fairly fucked up individual at times."

"You seem pretty well adjusted to me. Do you think he wants to sleep with you?"

There was a time he would have taken offense at the question but given that the man asking both wanted to and had succeeded in sleeping with this particular Daniel Jackson, and shared the same genetic code as the man under discussion, Daniel didn't feel it was an unreasonable question. "With Jack it would be very hard to tell. Off hand I'd say, no, he probably doesn't. I think he just doesn't want me sleeping with anyone else."

"What makes you say that?" As he spoke the man was gently undoing Daniel's robe, tugging at the belt then peeling back the damp towel.

"Because that's pretty much the stage I'm at with him. We might not want to actually do it but we sure as hell want to reserve the right to be the center of the other guy's existence, so in the meantime we do a good dog in the manger act."

"It's very hard for me to believe any guy doesn't want to sleep with you." A warm hand was slipped between Daniel's thighs as the man leaned forward and kissed Daniel's chest, licking his nipple thoughtfully. "I mean – why wouldn't he?"

Daniel smiled despite himself. "You are the best ego-boost in any universe, Colonel." 

O'Neill gave him a slow smile that lit a fire in every one of Daniel's erogenous zones. He encouraged Daniel's already hardening erection with warm, deft fingers. "Want some affirmation to take home with you?" 

"Yes, please," Daniel managed with an effort. "I think I would."

Two seconds later, the man had pulled Daniel over his body, rolled on top of him and began kissing him all over. Daniel sighed with mingled pleasure and regret as skilful hands and lips began to make him tingle. He knew they were right to call a halt to a relationship that was going nowhere, but he had to admit there were some things he was definitely going to miss….

***

So far he thought he was doing a pretty good job of keeping his temper. He hadn't bawled out anyone on Tollana as he asked them to send him to the same dimension to which Daniel had gone, and he'd quietly explained his urgent need to reclaim his absent team member to two different dimensional General Hammonds now without raising his voice. 

"Major Kawalsky…?"

It was a shock for O'Neill to turn around and see the man there. For a moment he was completely wrong-footed; opening his mouth to greet him and then realizing that this man was a stranger to him. He met his gaze and realized the guy knew everything; that O'Neill turning up wasn't so much a surprise as an expected problem.

"Do you know where Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson have gone this afternoon?"

Kawalsky looked all the perfect officer as he stood up straight and full of respect. "I think they're collecting soil samples, sir. As Captain Carter is busy giving a lecture, I think Doctor Jackson offered to get the samples for her. Colonel O'Neill would have driven him out to the appropriate place."

"The 'appropriate place' being where exactly?" O'Neill demanded. He wasn't buying the 'soil samples' crap for a moment. They could have got that in the parking lot. As the man didn't answer him straight away, he said, "It's urgent, Major. We need Daniel back in our dimension right now."

He and Kawalsky exchanged a glance for a moment, both letting the other see that he knew that he was lying. 

"Major…?" Hammond frowned. "Do you know where Doctor Jackson is?"

Kawalsky sighed, conceding defeat and evidently thinking it was better if he was the one to travel with him. "I'll drive Colonel O'Neill to where he could be, General."

O'Neill nodded politely to General Hammond, made appreciative noises, and then as soon as he was in the corridor with Kawalsky said, "Don't even think about taking me on a wild goose chase. I need to see Daniel right now."

"Yes, sir." There was a tinge of polite disbelief in Kawalsky's voice but he thought the guy had heard and understood all the same. Maybe he didn't believe that Daniel was needed urgently but he did seem to have grasped that getting O'Neill any more pissed than he was already was only going to make things worse.

They drove out through streets that were eerily familiar, with Kawalsky talking like a barber, saying 'sir' a lot and asking O'Neill how he liked his dimension and what was the weather like over there for the time of year until O'Neill thought the real tragedy was not that the Kawalsky in his dimension had died but that the Kawalsky in this dimension had not. Then finally they were pulling into the parking lot of a motel complex he didn't recognize, chalets discreetly separate from one another down lightly wooded paths. As they parked next to another Air Force issue jeep that seemed to make this potential betrayal concrete, O'Neill felt his hackles rise. A motel? Why the hell did they need to come to a motel to get 'soil samples'? He felt the buzzing sound in his head get a little louder, suspecting that by the time he knocked on the door it was going to be an all-enveloping wall of white noise.

All the way through the interview with that other General Hammond as he'd explained that Doctor Jackson was needed in their dimension – yes – urgently – a translation for the Tok'ra that couldn't wait; all the way here to this shabby collection of little chalets; he'd been thinking that when he got here if Daniel and that other O'Neill were…doin' it, he was going to go ballistic.

But he hadn't really believed it. This was _Daniel_ for crying out loud. Daniel didn't sleep with guys. Christ, Daniel barely slept with girls. Daniel was someone he watched out for because otherwise some designing woman or brutal man might take a shine to him and drag him off towards a bedroom. Daniel was someone he worried about getting raped by hairy primitives, or men doing a life sentence in an intergalactic prison, or that son of a bitch Heru'ur who'd had him kneeling at his feet on Abydos like he was _this_ close to putting a collar and chain around his neck, or those creeps in Netu who'd looked him over like they wanted to… And then there was Hathor, and Shyla, and Ke'ra. Damnit even Sha're had sort of taken advantage of him. They'd all got him when his defenses were low and then pounced on him. Daniel was someone who needed to be protected from sex he might not have asked for, didn't necessarily want, and which might physically, emotionally, or psychologically damage him.

He didn't know how to deal with Daniel as someone actively seeking out sex with someone. That someone being male made it even harder to deal with. That someone being _him_ made it almost impossible to deal with.

Which was probably why, when he looked through that grimy windowpane and saw through the gap in the thin curtains what Daniel and the other O'Neill were doing, his brain just locked and the anger drained straight out of him. It wasn't given a choice: the shock was taking up all available space.

Daniel had his fingers wrapped around the rails of the bed head, bracing himself against those thrusts, each one of which was sending a ripple right through him. O'Neill could see the sweat spiking his hair to his forehead and dripping down Daniel's bare chest; see the pale skin of his throat exposed and so vulnerable as Daniel put his head back, closing his eyes as the thrusts pounded faster and deeper. Those impossibly long legs were hooked up over the other O'Neill's shoulders and the position looked uncomfortable. There was a flicker of something that could have been pain crossing Daniel's face with every jerk of the other O'Neill's hips. 

For the first time O'Neill understood what fathers went through when they realized their once-virgin daughters were now definitely having sex. What elder brothers experienced when kid brothers got too old to be told what to do and insisted on taking that shortcut across the railroad track even though they'd been told twice already there was a train coming. But he also had a sudden uncomfortable realization of how it might have felt to walk in and find his wife in bed with another man.

Knowing that reaction was not just – inappropriate but downright presumptuous didn't help. Mixed in with the shock and disbelief there was also a definite feeling of betrayal. He felt wronged by this scene. There was an undeniable feeling on his part that this was an intimacy Daniel had no right sharing with anyone but him.

It didn't go any further than that. He wasn't actually feeling that he should be in that other O'Neill's place but he certainly _was_ feeling that O'Neill had no right being there and Daniel should never have let him do…that to him. At least not without discussing it with this O'Neill first. Daniel could argue this was between him and another guy and nothing to do with him but as that other guy's name was Jack O'Neill, he couldn't help feeling he was part of this scene whether he liked it or not. And he very emphatically didn't like it.

Daniel was screwing his face up now, jerking his head back further as the other man increased his pace. Daniel's whole body was being jolted by the force of those punishing thrusts. It looked like it was hurting him. It _had_ to be hurting him, and it went against every instinct he had to just stand there while someone hurt Daniel. But nothing and no one could have made him go in there. That O'Neill was slamming into Daniel now. Christ, that was his friend naked on that bed with that guy doing that to him. Did Daniel really want this? Had he consented to this? Maybe he hadn't. Maybe this was rape and he was just standing there letting it happen. How could he tell? Any Jack O'Neill could kill any Daniel Jackson with his bare hands. It wasn't an even partnership. Perhaps it never had been.

The other man's fingers were digging into Daniel's ribs, holding him still against the onslaught. Despite the double-glazing O'Neill could make out the sound of grunts of exertion, the slap of flesh on flesh; it sounded animal; savage. 

He twisted away from the window, sat down with his back against the wall of the chalet and put his hands to his ears, trying to block it out. There were good reasons why sex wasn't a spectator sport. There were even better reasons why you didn't just stand there and watch your best friend being fucked by a guy with your face. 

O'Neill put his head between his knees and took some deep breaths. He was shaking as hard as if a bomb had just gone off. He couldn't believe that something he'd been half expecting could still put him into shock. At least he wasn't angry any more. He didn't want to hit the other version of himself or yell at Daniel. He just didn't know if he could look Daniel in the eye again, and he felt as guilty and confused as though he was the one in that bedroom doing…that to Daniel. Perhaps because in a way he was.

After five minutes of deep breathing, he made himself get back up and look through the window again. There had been a change of pace and O'Neill was kissing Daniel tenderly then looking up to gaze into Daniel's eyes, hands in Daniel's hair, the thrusts slow and gentle now with long pauses in between. Daniel closing his eyes with each thrust in a way that undoubtedly suggested pleasure, then opening them again to look up at the O'Neill bending his head to kiss him, opening his mouth in response. Daniel looked as relaxed and sated as someone lying in a warm bath. Despite the way his legs were still hooked over O'Neill's shoulders, it was obvious that he was perfectly comfortable both with the way his body had been positioned and with that cock still thrusting inside him. It was clear, now that he looked properly, that Daniel was the one who had chosen this position, that Daniel's needs were being attended to as well as O'Neill's. Daniel wasn't being used for some guy's animal satisfaction; Daniel was a willing participant who had clearly learned what worked best for him.

He'd been aware from their first meeting that Daniel knew a lot about things he didn't, but they'd always been – academic things. He'd taken it for granted that anything physical would be an area where he had the jump on Daniel in every way. But in a period when the only new thing O'Neill had learned was that he couldn't beat his computer at chess even on the simplest setting, Daniel had clearly taught himself how to have sex with a guy and like it.

O'Neill turned away from the window and walked down the gravel path. Kawalsky was leaning against his USAF jeep, the tip of his cigarette glowing blood red in the dull afternoon light. The guy eyed him curiously and O'Neill tried to keep his feelings off his face but he didn't know how well he was succeeding. He felt like someone in shock, heart beating too fast, not quite enough oxygen available to him.

When the guy offered him a cigarette he almost took it, then the smoke curled at the back of his throat and he remembered he couldn't bear the smell of the things now. He shook his head. "No." That sounded too brusque. "Thanks." He realized by the look the man gave him, that Kawalsky knew what Daniel and his colonel were doing in there. He was trying to assess O'Neill's mood. Work out if he was likely to get nasty. O'Neill didn't know the answer to that himself.

O'Neill sat on the door of the truck and tried to stop his mind reeling. It was cold. He should get up and walk around. _Daniel's in there being fucked by him…by me._ He wondered what sort of a tree that was. Its leaves were already turning reddish gold but the day was so dull and overcast they had no beauty. One leaf fell from the branch, spiraled down slowly and landed very gently on his boot. _Daniel's in there having sex with a guy who looks just like me. Why him? Because he looks like me? And if so why not me? If this was what he wanted, why didn't he want it from me?  
_  
He wasn't sure how much time passed. He'd gone into a kind of trance state of circular questions and denial. Then he heard the door open and jerked his head up to see the other O'Neill standing there with Daniel. O'Neill was back in uniform whereas Daniel was still wearing a toweling robe. The look on Daniel's face hurt him inside and he felt the rage flare again. That bastard was _dumping_ him? But the way the other O'Neill reached out to touch Daniel's face was so full tender regret his guts twisted themselves into a completely different knot. Daniel and O'Neill went to kiss goodbye.

He jumped to his feet wanting to yell at Daniel not to do it, not in front of him, not again. Then Kawalsky coughed loudly and Daniel looked up, saw him, gasped, then stepped back out of sight. The other O'Neill jerked his head round in surprise. Their eyes met for a second then the man came towards him, long legs covering the gravel in a few strides. He looked military down to his socks. "Something wrong, Colonel?"

O'Neill found his voice with difficulty. "Nothing to worry about. We just need Daniel for a translation job." He looked the man in the eye then, bitterness creeping in. "Are you _done_ with him?"

He saw the other O'Neill grimace at the phrase then he said quietly, "We're done."

O'Neill watched him get into the truck then murmur something to Kawalsky, telling him to see them safely home no doubt, but he didn't wait to watch the guy drive off. He walked towards the chalet, trying to look stern and in control of himself while his heart continued to beat uncomfortably fast.

 

"How much did you see?"

Daniel sounded matter-of-fact. He was sitting on the bed still wearing just that toweling robe and he showed not a glimmer of fear of him. O'Neill didn't know if he was glad or sorry about that. Admittedly, he _hadn't_ come over here to deck Daniel, but he wasn't sure he liked Daniel knowing that.

"More than I wanted to." O'Neill looked round for the coffee pot and found it in the kitchen. There was enough left for another cup and he poured himself one, relieved to see his fingers had stopped trembling.

"Sorry." Daniel didn't sound particularly sorry. 

"I'll wait while you shower." He said it crisply and took a swig of coffee. It was over-brewed and tasted as thick and heavy on his tongue as boot polish. It took all the self-control he had not to spit it out on the floor.

Daniel picked up his clothes and carried them into the bathroom without a word.

Left in the bedroom, O'Neill was very aware of those rumpled sheets, the smell of sweat and semen still drying in the air. It was a strange mixture of scents because they were so familiar – his own aftershave mingling with his own sweat, Daniel's coffee and soap scent, that subtle hint of almond or whatever it was he had sometimes smelt in his hair – but he'd never before encountered them in this conjunction. It was like those chemicals Carter was always talking about, the kinds you kept in different bottles and never ever mixed because they were too volatile. 

He looked at the rumpled sheets again, the damp patch in the center, and shook his head. Aloud he said: "Daniel, what the _hell_ were you thinking?"

"Good question." Daniel came out of the shower in a haze of steam, polishing his glasses on the front of his t-shirt as he did so. His feet were bare and his jacket was slung over his shoulder, but apart from that he was definitely dressed. He continued evenly. "I don't know what I was thinking, Jack. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

O'Neill ran a hand through his hair. "I didn't come here to spy on you."

"Why did you come here then?"

"I don't know." 

Daniel looked ridiculously young with bare feet and no glasses. Much too young to be standing in the semen-scented motel bedroom having this conversation with him. He felt an absurd urge to take Daniel out and buy him a big chocolate ice cream with hot fudge sauce and whipped cream on top. Maybe take him to a movie afterwards. 

O'Neill shrugged helplessly. "I was worried about you. I needed to know you were okay."

Daniel sat on the bed and reached under it for what it took O'Neill a little while to realize were his boots. He could see them sitting under a chair on the other side of the room. "I'm okay." Daniel gave his glasses a last polish, put them on then glanced up at Jack sideways. He frowned in concern. "Are _you_ okay?"

"Not really, no." He watched Daniel groping for his boots for a minute then got up and went over to where they were lying. He picked them up and handed them to him. "You could have told me."

Daniel bent his head to pull on his socks. "If I'd wanted you to know, I would have."

"How could you not tell me?"

Daniel pulled on his first boot, briskly. "It was nothing to do with you."

"It _was_ me!"

"It was nothing to do with you." Daniel repeated it doggedly as he pulled on his second boot. He tied the lace with a defiant flourish then looked up at him, refusing to look regretful or guilty although O'Neill suspected it was taking him a considerable effort not to do both. "Shall we go?"

O'Neill caught his arm and felt Daniel go tense under his fingers. Perhaps he was worried about being punched after all. O'Neill had a hundred things he wanted to say and he couldn't put one of them into words. "Put your coat on," was all he could manage. "It's cold outside."

Daniel turned away and pulled on an overcoat O'Neill had never seen before. It was at least a size too big for him and just for a second he thought of Charlie. The winter coat he'd bought him for school. He and Sara getting him to try it on and then watching in dismay as the sleeves came down so far only the tips of his fingers were showing. Sara saying, "Well, perhaps he'll grow into it…"

Daniel opened the front door, letting in a blast of wintry air. O'Neill looked at the maroon scarf lying tossed on the back of the chair. "Do you want…?"

"No."

O'Neill followed Daniel back out to the jeep trying not to open and close his mouth like a goldfish as the indignation kept bubbling up to the surface then being choked back down into silence. Daniel smelt of warmth, soap, and shampoo, and as the wind whipped across the gravel it skimmed those scents back to him like sensory Frisbees. 

"Have you…?" As they reached the truck, the words came out awkwardly: "I mean – you and him – that was goodbye, wasn't it?"

Daniel didn't look at him but he gave a tight little nod. "That was goodbye."

O'Neill became aware of Kawalsky holding the car door open for him, staring straight ahead as he did so, like the world's most perfect butler, but O'Neill thought there was something in his stance that spoke of pity. As he turned to confront the guy, to tell him not to dare even think about pitying him, he saw Kawalsky looking not at him, but at Daniel, and there was nothing but anxiety in his eyes, a question there that needed reassurance. The watery smile Daniel gave him didn't seem to convince Kawalsky and it didn't convince O'Neill either although it did kill his anger. He felt weary suddenly with the realization that this was a mess that wasn't just going to go away. Even if it were never spoken of again, they would both remember this moment. He didn't want to look at Daniel's pale set face any more, or look at Kawalsky either, the guy looked too sorry for Daniel, as if he thought Daniel had lost something that mattered to him. O'Neill couldn't bear to think that might be true.

As he climbed up into the jeep behind Daniel, O'Neill didn't know which he was feeling the more strongly: relief that this weird affair was over and done with; or regret that at least one Daniel Jackson and a Jack O'Neill hadn't been able to make their relationship work.

***

"Daniel…?"

Daniel realized Sam was looking at him with 'that' expression again. The anxious-concerned one he'd seen rather too much of lately. They were working on trying to translate the missing parts of the mine manual for the Tok'ra, and it was lucky he and Sam got on as well as they did as it had involved several days of close communion. He could translate the Phoenician but he couldn't work out the math, while Sam had the opposite problem. Perhaps the Tok'ra strategy to cause a war between Apophis and Heru'ur had backfired but it was still a good idea for them to know what all of these symbols meant and how to use them.

He gave her an apologetic grimace. "Sorry."

"Were you thinking about…?" Her turn to wince at him. She had been the soul of discretion about not intruding on his feelings while sending out subtle hints that she was available to talk if he wanted to. She and Janet had been very protective of him ever since the business with Sarah. Having a trans-dimensional affair come to an end not necessarily of his choosing, then having his mentor die, then learning that someone else he had been close to had been taken over by a Goa'uld, not to mention being ribbon-deviced yet again, had caused the two women to form a circle of protection around him which even Jack hadn't been permitted to penetrate. He'd told Hammond he wasn't comfortable with the mission any more; that, useful as had been the information he'd gathered, he was afraid they might be doing more harm than good. He'd felt like a kid asking to be excused gym class; he'd also felt that if Hammond asked him too many questions there was a real danger he might start crying. Hammond had seemed to know that without being told, explaining quietly, and without making eye contact, that he'd received in the last dossier a handwritten note from the Colonel O'Neill of the other dimension explaining that their funding had run out and so Daniel's services would no longer be required but that he was very grateful for all that he had contributed and greatly appreciated Hammond letting them borrow him for the duration. Hammond had looked a little tight around the mouth and Daniel wondered if the man was now feeling that he had been pimping one of his people to get information. He couldn't explain that he'd asked Colonel O'Neill to write that note because he didn't want to play any more; that the man had done so without a word and Daniel still didn't know how he'd felt when he was writing it. Still didn't know how he felt either. They had broken up. It happened. And a feeling of emptiness inevitably ensued. He just wished there could have been a way for him to have his pathetic little fling without anyone else knowing about it. Without Jack knowing about it in particular.

"I was thinking about Martouf." Seeing the shocked look in her blue eyes, he winced again. "God, Sam, I'm sorry, I meant the other Martouf. He was about to go off on a dangerous mission last time I saw him and I was wondering how he was getting on. Sorry. Dimension-hopping really screws you up."

"It's okay." She gave him a rather shaky smile. "I actually find it comforting to think he's still alive somewhere. What was the mission?"

"We don't need to talk about it if you'd rather not. I just keep wondering how they're all doing…"

"It really is okay, Daniel." She put a hand on his shoulder. "I want to know. And of course you wonder about them. You spent enough time with…" She broke off quickly. "I didn't mean – "

This was actually getting silly. Daniel tried and failed to suppress a grin. "Talk about sensitive topics of conversation, eh?"

Sam also grinned. "I know. So, whose turn is it to put their foot in it now?"

"I think it's mine." He gave her a sideways glance. "Martouf and another Tok'ra called Khenera were trying to infiltrate Apophis's forces. In that dimension, Apophis and Heru'ur are just warming up to making an alliance."

"Don't you think you ought to go over there and warn them about the cloaking device Apophis might have? Not to mention heading them off from trying that trick we attempted with the mine field?"

"They know about it. They want to try things their own way." Daniel shrugged helplessly. "And I'm still not convinced we have the right to interfere with another dimension. Our record in _this_ dimension isn't too special, after all. We've twice tried to stop an evil Goa'uld becoming so powerful that he can challenge the System Lords. The first time we ended up breaking Apophis out of Netu and giving him all of Sokar's forces. The second time we gave him Heru'ur's army. I could go over there and tell them about the ways we screwed up, but the fact is we don't know if we _did_ screw up or if our mistakes might ultimately lead to the downfall of the Goa'uld. I just feel more and more that we should let every dimension make its own mistakes while we concentrate on trying to repair our own."

Sam moistened her lips. "Are you okay with not seeing the other Colonel again?"

Daniel pulled a face. "We weren't meant to be together, Sam. Having been born into entirely different dimensions should have been our first clue on that."

"Do you miss him?" 

He looked at her. "Do you miss Martouf?"

"Yes." She answered without hesitation. "But that's different."

"Yes, it is." He picked up another book on the Phoenician alphabet. "You had the sense to realize that there was no point in looking in another dimension for what you couldn't get in this one."

She touched his arm gently. "Daniel, Colonel O'Neill is alive in this dimension."

"I know." He ran a hand through his hair. "That's what Jack can't forgive me for. I ran off to play with another version of him when he was right here."

"There's nothing for him to forgive." She looked indignant on his behalf. "The other Colonel was offering you completely different things."

He closed the book with a decisive snap. "But I didn't want different things, Sam. That was the stupid part about it. I wanted Jack to be my best friend again but instead of telling him that I went and had a completely different kind of relationship with a completely different kind of Jack. Even by my standards that was pretty dumb."

"You're a lot of things, Daniel," she told him dryly, "but 'dumb' certainly isn't one of them."

"I'm not so sure." He took off his glasses and cleaned them to avoid having to meet her eye. "Managing to screw up with the same guy in two different universes takes a special kind of stupidity. And I think it's going to take a hell of a lot of fishing trips before Jack stops being pissed with me."

 

O'Neill winced as he heard those last words, and backed up hurriedly. He'd been intending to continue with his 'Hey, look how normal we all are with each other' strategy and tell those two to quit it with the work and come and get some pizza with him. But that didn't seem like such a good idea now. Going off to the commissary by himself now seemed like a much better idea.

Sitting in the commissary pushing the limp lettuce leaves away from his sandwich – why did they always give you salad even when you didn't want it and definitely weren't going to eat it? – he was still asking himself how he'd managed to make his relationship with Carter and Daniel so damned complicated. Well, actually, he hoped he and Carter had sorted things out now. If she was still pining after him she was disguising it _very_ well. And he didn't think he was full of subliminal yearnings for her either. And, come to think of it, if he'd been guilty of driving the first wedge into his relationship with Daniel, Daniel had certainly done his share of…complicating himself. This O'Neill might have acted like an idiot at times but he hadn't run off to a different dimension and got naked with a different Daniel Jackson. Round about now there was a part of him that wanted to but even if he didn't spend too many hours of daylight examining his motives, he could work out this was a tit-for-tat thing he should resist. 

Because yes, if he was honest, the thought of sneaking over to the universe where 'that' O'Neill hung out, taking his apparently oh-so-innocent little Daniel Jackson away from him then handing the boy back to him a lot less innocent than when he'd last seen him, had a lot of appeal. It would serve the son-of-a-bitch right to find out how that felt. But he couldn't do it without being way colder to a Daniel Jackson than he was willing to be; not to mention unkind to _his_ Daniel, who didn't need that kind of mind-fuck right now; and anyway, what if he made a play for that other Daniel and the other Daniel didn't want to know? Then the other O'Neill would be more than one up on him, he'd be about ten up on him, and how galling would _that_ be?

O'Neill sighed and pushed his lettuce leaf right off the plate where it couldn't possibly soften up his sandwich with its irritating limpness.

He'd been told by people who played the piano that there was a strange process you went through with learning a new tune. At first you had to keep looking at the sheet music and really tell yourself which note meant which finger had to hit which key; but then there came a point where your fingers seemed to be able to absorb the notes without apparently needing much help from your brain and you were sight-reading effortlessly; you played on an adrenalin rush, not quite sure how you were doing it, just knowing if you thought about it too much you'd screw up. Then you started thinking about it too much and you did screw up. Sometimes, months after you'd been able to play a piece perfectly, you found yourself having to go all the way back to the beginning to relearn it note by note.

He was starting to think this was frustratingly close to the way he'd handled his friendship with Daniel. A year ago it had seemed so damned easy he'd never thought he'd need to look at the sheet music again. Now, he was wondering if he wasn't going to have to go all the way back to Middle C and start over.

After he'd got Daniel back from that other dimension he'd been ready, willing, and able to put in some serious repair work on their friendship, but Daniel kept slipping through his fingers like the world's most elusive minnow. He'd kept calling up Daniel on the weekends and only getting his machine, then waiting in just in case Daniel called him back and not hearing from him until late on Sunday evening. Then when he'd suggest a few beers before bedtime, Daniel would tell him he was too tired, sorry, could he take a rain check on that? The next weekend on world the whole process would start over again. He'd found himself swinging between annoyance and concern. There were days when he felt nothing other than irritated with Daniel, then other days when he wanted to remind him how close they'd been. 

He'd tried to be there for him when that Professor guy had died but Daniel had edged away from talking to him, just saying he'd be fine, really, Jack. Daniel phoning up to talk to Teal'c – not even a 'Hello, how are you doing?' to him – had felt like the last straw. Then he'd come back to find Daniel had been through the wringer again while he'd been voluntarily uncontactable; that Carter and Fraiser had been the ones lending him emotional and moral support while Daniel had to deal with yet another Goa'uld who'd taken someone he cared about for a host. When he'd come back from his fishing trip to find Daniel in the infirmary – again, having been ribbon-deviced – again, he'd been torn between guilt and the urge to yell: 'Why didn't you _tell_ me you needed me?'

Learning that in the middle of all this shutting him out and damned near getting himself killed, Daniel had also been getting naked in another dimension with a different version of Jack O'Neill had pushed his blood pressure way up past the danger mark. The X-ratable dreams his unhelpful subconscious had started feeding into his sleeping mind since seeing those two together really hadn't helped iron out his confusion either. If it was difficult coming into work with someone you'd recently watched being fucked by a guy with your face. It didn't get any easier when your waking mind was still swimming with tangled remnants of that someone with his head in your lap. Those images made him feel unclean, not because they didn't arouse him, but because they did, and, unlike that _other_ O'Neill, Daniel had never given his permission for this O'Neill to think about him that way. Meaning that every time O'Neill spanked the monkey while trying to recapture the fading sensations from those illicit dreams, he was committing another betrayal on top of all the other betrayals, while still feeling aggrievedly that it was really Daniel who'd started this.

Now he felt hurt, angry, and baffled most of the time. He found himself wanting to say 'Daniel, you do remember how close we used to be?' without actually saying it. He was seriously starting to worry that Daniel had forgotten what good friends they were. How he and Daniel were _best_ friends. Yes, Daniel was close to Carter and Teal'c, yes he was fond of Doc Fraiser and Hammond, but he and Daniel had always been closer still. Daniel loved him best, damnit. Daniel always had. 

After all, his had always been the name Daniel said when he came round. Even on P3X-797 when Daniel had woken up after being turned into a caveman it had been 'Jack' he'd said. Not Teal'c. Teal'c might have been the last member of the SGC Daniel had seen. Teal'c might have been the guy who'd carried him back to the Land of Light and been sitting waiting for Daniel to wake up. And Jack might have been the guy who'd beaten the crap out of him for no reason at all. But 'Jack' had still been the name on Daniel's lips as he groped his way back to consciousness. And that was the way it _should_ be. They'd been on the first mission together. They'd defeated Ra together. He and Daniel had a connection no one else had. Consequently, they forgave each other all kinds of stuff because that was just what they did. But recently Daniel didn't seem to be aware of that.

He kept wanting to remind Daniel about this special relationship they shared without actually spelling it out. But he wanted it acknowledged, in public, by Daniel. The trouble was he'd been pretty irritable with Daniel recently. Daniel kept worrying and upsetting him. He knew Daniel must be miserable – he'd just had a complicated affair end badly, who wouldn't be? On top of that he'd had that girl from his college turned into a Goa'uld. Daniel clearly needed him right now. But he wasn't acting like he needed him, damn him.

He'd found it all bubbling up before they set off to reprogram that mine. Which had incidentally been another _great_ idea from the people who'd brought them the Adrenalin Overload Ataneik armbands and the You're A Zatarg Oops Sorry Our Mistake No You're Not machine, and now the Let's Hand Apophis Heru'ur's Armies On A Plate plan. It had been annoying enough to hear that Daniel was a vital component in the Tok'ra's strategy and Carter a very useful addition, while he was only an optional extra if he felt like tagging along. Then Daniel had been late, as usual, and he'd felt the irritation that was always bubbling away in the background since he'd been forced to see Daniel doing…that with…him, start boiling up again. 

He knew if they got into an argument Daniel would win. Daniel always did win. He went into waspish smartass mode, and O'Neill got left behind looking silly. They'd had the usual back and forth exchange of put downs in the elevator, then some devil in him had made him want to remind Daniel that they had the kind of relationship which allowed for intimacies other people simply didn't share. He'd pushed Daniel's glasses back onto his nose gently yet firmly but in a way that told Daniel and anyone else who happened to be watching very clearly: 'I'm allowed to do this. This is the kind of relationship we have.' It had shut Daniel up very effectively. In fact he'd been so taken by surprise he'd barely said another word until they were on the tel'tak. Then he'd buried himself in his textbooks and talked almost exclusively to Carter. But O'Neill hadn't felt as though Daniel was shutting him out this time, just that Daniel didn't know where he was coming from and didn't know how to deal with him.

It had been hours later that he'd realized Daniel might have been more affected than either of them had bargained for by an intimate gesture from a Jack O'Neill now he'd achieved a whole new level of intimacy with a different Jack O'Neill. As by that time they'd had a three-quarters dead Teal'c to worry themselves sick about, he hadn't had much time to work out anything with Daniel. 

A week later, he still hadn't managed to work out anything with Daniel.

***

He remembered trusting O'Neill's body even though he hadn't particularly desired it; too familiar _not_ to trust. Remembered the man pouring him dry red confidence into a long-stemmed wine glass. Another difference between them he had never really been able to get used to. He associated Jack with beer and whiskey, not wine. The wine had shocked him in a way those practiced dry kisses never had.

It had been different for O'Neill, of course; for him it really had been love with a stranger; for Daniel there had been the constant shock of familiarity; too many of his senses telling him that he was with someone he knew. There had been a certain formality about their love-making. He and O'Neill indulging in a lot of hand-washing and rinsing of body parts for the sake of politeness. Towels and lube utilized in abundance. They tended to avert their eyes at significant moments, Daniel fixing his gaze on some point over the man's shoulder as fingers or cock were slipped into him; embarrassed by the intimacy of the action even as his desire and heartbeat quickened. There had been a certain brisk efficiency about O'Neill also, he remembered. Practiced. Skilful. Always good-humored and easy-going even in the midst of sex, but always keeping a part of himself in reserve. 

The very first time he'd been taken by surprise; drunk and nervous and kissed before he was ready for it. Kisses that began as playful and inviting and so quickly became the just-before-sex kind, slow and deep then passionate and urgent. He'd been pulled along in the other man's slipstream of certainty; mouth thoroughly explored while he responded a half-beat behind the bar, body tingling with anticipation as fingers were slipped inside his shirt, touched his nipples, cupped his ass, reached down into his pants, inside his boxers, stroked him to hardness… Breath catching in his chest, heart hammering with anticipation and nerves and confused desire. 

He'd found himself giddy and naked and kneeling on a bed, scared and aroused at once. He remembered the harsh sound of O'Neill's breathing, the shock of a hand continuing to explore him; another man touching his cock, stroking his balls; places he'd been told if someone ever touched him he should tell someone; places only bad men would touch. His own lack of sophistication had come as a shock to him. All those years of studying anthropology and his instinctive reference for what was taking place between him and this other consenting adult was to remember warnings from anxious grade school teachers frightened by his habit of thinking all strangers were potential friends. That was when he'd realized how drunk he must be; head swimming as the wine hit home, body still tingling in nervous anticipation as he was kissed and stroked and licked and nibbled. The kisses that had found all those nerve points he hadn't realized he had behind his ear, at his neck. The murmurs in his ear had been fond and dirty at once. Words he'd never actually heard aloud before; said in Jack's voice, which was what had made them so hypnotic and shocking; to think of the man he knew so well saying these things. A part of him must always have known that he had made himself vulnerable with a stranger, but all his instincts kept insisting this man was Jack O'Neill and he knew very well that Jack O'Neill would never hurt him. And O'Neill was so definite in his intentions, so focused on what he thought they should be doing, and, after all it was true, why else was Daniel here if not for this? Swaying on the bed on his hands and knees, feeling a little queasy with all the wine he'd drunk so fast, he had been seduced by the man's certainties as much as his own arousal; and his own damned curiosity, of course. The need to explore this new possibility had overwhelmed his sense of self-preservation, as it had done so many times in the past.

Then a fingertip had found its way inside his opening and he'd gasped with the shock of it; scared and fascinated in equal measure as the man worked a gel-coated finger inside him up to the first joint, then to the knuckle, then deeper. Two fingers scissoring inside him to stretch his ring, a dirty joke the other man breathed in his ear to distract him. Practiced, so practiced, Daniel just one on a long conveyer belt of previous conquests. He'd missed the punchline although he remembered there had been something about a nun. He'd laughed nervously at the wrong time because there were three fingers inside him by that point, making him wince, and he knew an erect cock was going to be next. He was getting a panicked flashback to all the times he'd seen Jack in the shower, wondering how that innocuous bundle of soft penis and vulnerable testicles would translate into a blood-filled erection. He had still been thinking 'I can't do this. I _can't_ do this…' when he'd heard the sound of the condom being opened.

O'Neill had said, "Are you comfortable?" and it had caught him off his guard, because the question he had been waiting for was 'Are you sure you want to do this?' and he would have answered 'No'. He would have sweetened it with a smile and an apologetic grimace or two, but he had his answer all ready. Then the man asked him instead if he was comfortable, as if not having sex wasn't an option, just the manner in which it was done, and the truth was that he was comfortable. The mattress was firm and there was nothing wrong with his knees. So he said, "Yes."

O'Neill said, "Tell me if it hurts more than a little," and then there was the lube-and-condom-covered head of another man's cock pressing at his opening while he was still wondering how one defined 'a little'. 

The head being pushed inside his ring hurt what he would have called a lot more than a 'little'; a stretch and burn that made him gasp. A hand on his hip stopped him moving forward and for a second he had felt a flutter of panic, being held onto something that hurt when his instinct was to pull away.

"Okay…?"

"Give me a minute," he said tautly. He envisaged the physics of it, his ring now squeezing the man's cock just behind the head, how much bigger the head was than the part of the shaft immediately below it. Pushing forward wasn't going to stretch the ring much more than it was already, unless O'Neill had the kind of cock that was a lot thicker at the base than the shaft, but pulling out was going to have that cock head pulled backwards which was going to hurt a lot. He swallowed hard. "Don't push all the way in, please." 

"I won't, I promise."

Daniel jumped as the man stroked his thigh gently, soothing him as if he was a nervous horse. He realized he had tears in his eyes and didn't know if it was because of the pain or the fact he was letting a man he barely knew have sex with him. O'Neill had kissed him then, gently on the cheek, said something funny that made him laugh, albeit a little nervously. Because they were physically joined now, when he laughed he realized the man could feel it, a reverberation down his shaft. He was still thinking of that when there was the inevitable forward push came and the cock slid into him. That had hurt more than a 'little' as well – a burning, stretching pain. The hand on his hip had felt remorseless, holding him still against the pressure; a kind of matter-of-factness in the man's actions that reminded him of the way farmers were with their animals; briskly kind but with a cut-off point on their compassion. 

As the burn began to fade, his body to accommodate the intruder, to accept the strange fullness stretching it so strangely, O'Neill said gently, "Tell me if you want me to pull out."

A part of him wondered if the man had manipulated him cynically; asking the right question at the wrong moment; leaving it until now to ask Daniel if he wanted him to withdraw, when the worst was over and the curiosity was starting to reassert itself. Or if he was just being paranoid because he'd gotten himself into deeper waters than he'd been prepared for and was now wanting to lash out at the person who had just stolen his heterosexuality. Later he'd realized the guy had been guilty of nothing except an assumption that Daniel desired him; the evidence had certainly supported that assumption, after all; that Daniel had made the journey because he wanted to have sex with him. He only hadn't asked if Daniel had been sure he wanted to do this because he'd assumed a guy as smart as Daniel was meant to be would have asked himself that question long before they ever got to this stage. The man hadn't been manipulating him, just giving him credit for having more sense than he did.

"I can stop any time." He sounded as concerned as his Jack would have done in these circumstances. Except, of course, 'his' Jack wasn't his and had no interest in being a part of these circumstances. "Doc…?"

Daniel forced a smile although the man couldn't see his face anyway. "It's fine."

"If you don't like it, we don't have to do this."

"It's okay. I want you to…" He hadn't finished the sentence because he couldn't put it into words. The truth was that he wasn't enjoying it and it was hurting him more than somewhat, but he was still excited by it, either by the sensations or perhaps just his own recklessness. He wanted the experience. All of the experience. If the other man pulled out now it wouldn't count for anything. Having come this far he now wanted to be able to tell himself that he'd had sex with a man, not bailed halfway through and run back home to his lonely bed and the sticky predictability of his own right hand.

O'Neill fucked him then, and it felt strange and awful and painful and pleasurable at once; a jangle of too many sensations to catalogue. Those strange nerve flickers that felt so good had disconcerted him the most; this proof that his body was receptive to this; designed to enjoy this; as if it had known for years that this was what he really wanted while he had never even guessed. Those strange sounds of them interconnecting; a wet slap of flesh against flesh; his own reedy little moans at the bruising extremity of each thrust into his tender body. It had been a shock also to realize he was the cause of not just another man's erection but another man's climax. He'd never elicited desire from a man before; not like this; making him grunt with exertion as he thrust, sweating and panting and groaning with desire, Daniel's body the thing exciting himself towards climax, then climax itself, a hoarse cry and fluid spurting inside him. It had shocked him that he'd done that; made a man come. Made a Jack O'Neill come. He'd still been kneeling there thinking that dazedly when O'Neill had wrapped his arms around him and pulled him onto his side on the bed, kissing him, sated cock sliding out of him painlessly. 

The guy's experience had been all in Daniel's favor then, the skill of this kisses and the way he pumped Daniel to climax, deliberately frying his mind with pleasure, captivating his body with the intensity of its reaction. Making him come, Daniel choking down an exclamation at the moment of truth, his semen spurting hotly onto the man's right hand.

O'Neill had handed Daniel another glass of wine afterwards, let him down it all, then said, "You may like this position better."

Daniel found himself on his back with his knees hooked over O'Neill's forearms as the man bore down on him with careful determination. This time O'Neill kissed him as he entered him, when Daniel's mouth opened in the shock of feeling that oversized head stretching his opening again, the man's tongue slipped inside and distracted him. The man had been right. He had liked this position much better. He'd liked it to the point where he had shocked himself.

"It's your prostate…" O'Neill told him gently in between thrusts, evidently reading without difficulty the expressions of surprise and pleasure and shame flickering across Daniel's face. "It's easier for me to hit it in this position."

"I…know…" Daniel panted back, but it was one thing to know where a gland was, something else entirely to feel those explosions of pleasure as the man's cock jolted against it. He came with a strangled cry he did his best to stifle, his semen spraying onto the other man's chest. "Sorry…"

"Don't be." O'Neill smiled at him and stroked his hair back from his forehead. Daniel starting a little at the intimacy of it; of being touched. The sex was more distant, somehow. Something grown-ups did for pleasure; no strings; no commitment. It made no claims on either of them. If they were going to caress and share confidences, that made it a different experience entirely. O'Neill noticed his little start and frowned then bent and kissed him, a hint of defiance in the action underlying the undoubted skill, challenging Daniel to tell him not to. He pushed forward at the same time. Slow and deep; very deep; too deep. Daniel flexed and gasped, and the man pulled back and thrust more shallowly. 

Daniel had felt more than once like the white mouse in an experiment he didn't fully understand. O'Neill would try something, gauge his reaction, and then move on swiftly, data accumulated, the things Daniel liked, the things he didn't like; sensitive to all the nuances of expression and body language. Daniel never had to articulate what made him uncomfortable or what he didn't enjoy; O'Neill would lightly test his boundaries and then pull back from them at once. But his superior knowledge gave him an advantage Daniel couldn't compete with. The man had spent decades learning what he liked best and how to get it from other people, not to mention how to make other people of both genders come screaming. He desired Daniel and he liked penetrative sex so he needed to teach Daniel to like penetrative sex for them both to enjoy themselves in bed. So that was what he'd done, and very well too. He'd tapped into that secret core of Daniel that felt empowered by feeling a man fuck him, by feeling a cock that had got hard at the prospect of entering him, being inside him. That loved the lightning strikes of those impacts on his prostate gland more than any other sexual pleasure he had ever known, loved the combination of power and powerlessness that came from being held down and thrust into by someone he could stop with a word, with a wince, with a whisper.

He'd thought he might hate the guy for revealing this new part of himself but as he made his way back to the SGC after their first furtive coupling, he felt like someone who'd just hit a new plane of maturity, someone who had shown courage enough to explore the brave new world that was himself. Perhaps, given the way Jack had been treating him for a few months by then, he really had needed to know how the man looked when he came; to know also that he had the power to make him come, could sit in the briefing room with that faint pleasurable ache inside himself knowing that if he wanted to he could make Jack O'Neill come screaming and shooting like Billy the Kid. The hollow sadness that accompanied that knowledge was something he had just tried to ignore. It would only make him brittle in the end; make him weep, and he'd decided at Sha're's funeral that he was done with crying, especially over people that he loved.

He'd kept going back because…because… Perhaps because he literally had nothing better to do with his time. Because he was lonely. Because the other man was funny and kind and made him laugh and paid him compliments and because he missed the Jack he knew so much he was willing to take even something he'd never known he was looking for in place of the friendship he seemed to have lost. It felt good to sit and talk to a Jack O'Neill over dinner and compare notes on what they'd done since they last met up. To never argue. To not know everything there was to know. To have questions left to ask. To have the option of not telling the truth. Even though he'd never taken that opportunity, a part of him had been glad that it was there. It sometimes felt as if his and Jack's shared knowledge of one another was a burden from which they couldn't escape. Perhaps they'd seen too much of one another at their worst not to be resentful. Perhaps from now on in their friendship this really was as good as it got.

With O'Neill it was always holiday, never everyday. Time stolen out of ordinary life and special as a consequence. There was always wine and Daniel was always light-headed with tension even before he reached the bedroom; could never eat when he was nervous, and was always nervous on the days when he was dimension-hopping to meet with the man, and so got drunk in double quick time once he was with him. There had been an unspoken agreement on both their parts that it was probably better if Daniel was at least slightly intoxicated as it stopped him tensing up at the crucial moment. The glass was handed to him as he stepped through the door and he drank it down in a few gulps before essaying a nervous smile. O'Neill had never been nervous. The man so obviously knew what he was doing; had done it so many times before. He had taken the lead each time and all Daniel had needed to do was follow.

If he was honest, there had been an element of ordeal about it also, because the sex did scare him more than he would ever have admitted. It was his own dangerous sport, a risk he felt compelled to take; a trial Daniel had passed the last time and the one before but which he might fail to find the courage for on this occasion. The first time it always hurt a little, that moment of penetration. Daniel unable to relax quite as much as he needed to, his body unconvinced it wanted this until O'Neill made him climax – which he always did. Daniel's body so unused to being touched in such a way that he responded strongly to caresses that were perhaps more efficient than romantic, but still the man had pressed buttons Daniel hadn't known existed to make him come and Daniel had come every time.

There were other small weirdnesses. No one had ever praised him for this size of his…equipment before, but O'Neill had. Told him with a dirty grin that despite looking like jailbait he certainly wasn't a little boy, was he? Daniel had been flattered and excited by the man's obvious approval, but a little perplexed. Why should this guy care how big Daniel's penis was as his only contact with it was to wrap his hand around it with brisk efficiency and pump it until Daniel spilled himself all over the bed or to take it wonderfully deep into his mouth and suck on it? But it was one of the things that got the guy horny, seeing Daniel naked, appraising his body, touching it, wrapping warm fingers around Daniel's cock and stroking him to hardness then whispering words of very dirty praise in his ear. No one had ever teased him about his body before. No one, as far as he knew, had even noticed his body before. He had been the first man Sha're had ever seen naked; the first man she had the right to touch wherever she liked; so there had been no one for her to compare him to. Certainly no one in the past had ever told him he had a biteable ass or skin so silky he wanted to lick honey from it, or explained in vivid detail exactly how Daniel felt from the inside out – a velvet tightness which once entered a guy just never wanted to leave: that was what the man had whispered in his ear in between thrusts so deep Daniel had barely been able to hear him over the sound of his own moans. New, naughty, exciting stuff that made him feel very bad and very good at the same time; like a high school kid who had just taken his first furtive and intoxicating inhalation of pot.

O'Neill always put on his own condoms, as practiced at that as he was at everything else, tearing the foil with his teeth and unwrapping it over his erection while talking about something else. Daniel had watched the way he pulled it on so easily, as if he'd done it so many times, the way girlfriends at college had pulled on their nylons without catching their fingernails in them while telling him about the movie they were going to watch. He'd watch in fascination as the sheath was slipped on, the lube applied, a pinkish gel of a brand Daniel didn't recognize, something unique to the other man's dimension.

"Are you comfortable?"

O'Neill always asked him that and Daniel always took a moment to change his position slightly before saying 'yes' as if to convince both of them that he was an equal partner in this. That he too knew what he was doing. The truth was he had no idea what he was doing, but he figured if he did it enough times he would at least look as if he did. It bothered him a little that the pain didn't bother him, even though he feared it in the intervening days, thought about it, trying to remember exactly what that sensation was, like someone unable to stop flicking his tongue across a cracked tooth. He wondered if that made him a masochist. If he was secretly someone who enjoyed being overwhelmed with life; inherently passive and inclined to be swept along by the tide; his innate stubbornness his only anchor. But he thought what he really liked was being treated as a grown up by the other man. As an equal. Someone old enough to have sex with a guy. He wasn't sure Jack thought of him that way. He'd always felt disapproval radiating at him from Jack and Teal'c whenever he got involved with a woman, as if he was doing something reckless that would be sure to end in tears. They never seemed to think of him as someone with bodily needs, with a libido of his own. O'Neill took it for granted that he wanted to get off; being an adult male, why wouldn't he? And Daniel was pathetically grateful for that. And for the man's kindness to him. The compliments he paid him. The way he never talked down to him, never yelled at him, never got angry; was always so laid back and easy going and fun to be with. The way he never talked about the sex afterwards. Never discussed his findings, just quietly put them into practice the next time they met up.

Daniel had to admit that a part of him was a little resentful that if and when O'Neill seduced the Daniel in his dimension he would have all that data to work from which Daniel had given him. That the other Daniel would be getting to have mind-blowing sex from day one because 'his' Jack knew all his likes and dislikes. On the really bad days he found himself wondering gloomily if that was all he'd ever been to O'Neill, an information-gathering exercise to give the man a road map to the other Daniel's hot spots. He would have to remind himself then that O'Neill hadn't even known the other Daniel had existed until after he'd met this Daniel, but it still stung to think of the man finding that perfect angle the first time they made out, the other Daniel getting the benefits of this Daniel's experience. 

He missed O'Neill. Missed his company, missed the sex, resented having his own independent life turned from a secret he could hug to himself into something else Jack could reproach him for. But that was just a gnat bite of regret compared with all his other regrets. The worst of which was that in irreparably screwing up with O'Neill he was terribly afraid he had also succeeded in screwing up with Jack. And he had no idea how to ever put their friendship back together again.

***

Sometimes Teal'c thought of it as an ocean intent on tossing him upon its surface when he wanted to reach the still calm of its sea-green depths. Sometimes it was a maze whose center he needed to reach. Gulls with the faces of false gods would shriek at him; or those who had died by his hand would point accusing fingers from the mauve shadows of each dead end. Fear for Dray'auc and Ry'ac would manifest itself in the shape of a mist which would envelop him in its chill folds, leadening his limbs. Grief for Shaunac and his murdered father would spread tendrils of sorrow, cloying creepers he would have to fight his way past. But despite them all he would always reach the quiet stillness at the center of himself; communion without contamination with that necessary abomination which nestled in his womb. 

Except today he was having difficulties achieving kelno'reem. He opened his eyes and looked across the room. Daniel Jackson was meditating with him again as he had so often over the past weeks. The young man was sitting cross-legged across the other side of circle of candles, very still and apparently at peace. Teal'c blinked as the smoke from the candles swirled upwards in a slow coil. Ter'ak, if he had survived his transfer to the service of Apophis, was no doubt hoping Teal'c's memories were haunted by memories of him. He would pray his certainty as much as his weapons of torture had undermined the strength of Teal'c's convictions. He would be wrong.

When he closed his eyes, Teal'c saw not himself chained in a dungeon with the prospect only of more suffering ahead of him, but the young man now meditating quietly outside the circle of candlelight. What Teal'c saw when he closed his eyes was himself about to rape Daniel Jackson. 

Teal'c flinched from the memory. However many times he reminded himself that he had killed the monster who would have dishonored his friend, he could not get the image of that other Teal'c out of his mind.

As if he sensed Teal'c's thought process, Daniel Jackson opened his eyes. Blinking a little from the candlelight, he looked at him with concern. "Teal'c?"

"Yes, Daniel Jackson?" As he answered him promptly and calmly, Teal'c knew that nothing of his inner turmoil showed on his face.

"Are you okay?"

"I am fine."

"Do you want to talk about what happened when you were a prisoner on Heru'ur's ship?" Daniel Jackson said it hesitantly. Even after all they had been through together he never liked to intrude; offered his sympathy diffidently and – given his verbal dexterity on other occasions – haltingly. It was one of the few ways in which he was similar to O'Neill.

Teal'c said, "Do you wish to talk about what was done to you while you were in the other universe?"

"Done to me?" Daniel Jackson looked mildly alarmed. "By the other Jack?"

"By the other me."

Daniel Jackson gazed at him for a moment in surprise. "He didn't do anything to me, Teal'c. You stopped him." There was a pause before he said: "You do know Jack feels terrible about your being that guy's prisoner all that time? We all do. We didn't know. We tried to intercept the matter stream. Jack wouldn't have left you – "

As Teal'c listened to the words tumbling from Daniel Jackson's mouth, he noted in passing that his lip had healed again. It had been cut by O'Neill when their memories were not their own and then cut again by that other version of himself who had evidently struck him across the face hard enough to draw blood.

It had never troubled him in the past that he had noticed Daniel Jackson was an attractive young man. As a warrior he considered it important that he should be aware of the weaknesses and strengths of both his allies and his enemies. He would therefore have thought the less of himself had he not noted the physical beauty of both Major Carter and Daniel Jackson upon their first meeting, for it was potentially both a weakness and a strength. It only made him better able to defend them if he was aware of how they might be perceived by others. He had noticed with some amusement how many of the soldiers in the SGC tried to pretend they were unaware of the physical attractions of his teammates. He had seen more than one airman become aroused in the showers after surreptitiously observing Daniel Jackson obliviously rinsing himself in a neighboring cubicle. The airmen always showed signs of distress, confusion, and sometimes anger, when this occurred, their physical reaction to Teal'c's teammate clearly taking them unawares. However after witnessing what was becoming quite a regular occurrence, O'Neill had been distinctly unamused and since then he had ensured the three males of SG-1 only showered with each other.

Teal'c wondered how safe that made Daniel Jackson feel now that a different version of one of his male teammates had sexually abused him, and the other had succeeded in seducing him.

"Daniel Jackson, do you not have nightmares about the Teal'c from that dimension?"

Teal'c watched the young man open his mouth and then close it again. Daniel Jackson moistened his lips. "Sometimes." He winced apologetically as he said it.

"So do I." Teal'c told him quietly.

Daniel Jackson looked at him in deepening concern. "We've been through this. We both know he wasn't you."

"But he was me. That is the problem."

"I don't see a problem." Daniel Jackson was quietly insistent. "Teal'c, you have to trust me on this. You're my friend. I know you're a good man. We could travel to twenty different dimensions and meet twenty Teal'cs who still served Apophis but that wouldn't make any difference to the way I feel about _you_."

"Then the way you feel about the other O'Neill has not altered the way you feel about the one in our dimension?"

Daniel held up a finger, made a circling motion with it, then pulled a face. "Um – can I get back to you on that?"

"You are uncomfortable with O'Neill because you have seen him in a different light, are you not? Does it not then follow that having seen me in a different light you should also…?"

"No. It doesn't." Daniel Jackson said it firmly. "And I'm not uncomfortable with Jack because I – did what I did with that other Jack. I'm uncomfortable with Jack because he happened to walk in while I was doing it and I'm now assuming he thinks I slept with that Jack because I wanted to sleep with him."

"And did you?" Teal'c pressed quietly.

Daniel Jackson looked at him for a moment and then moistened his lips. "I have no idea."

The young man's smile was infectious and Teal'c felt some of the guilt loosen itself from around his heart. "Daniel Jackson, you should never – "

He broke off as the door opened. Daniel Jackson was concealed behind it from the man who stood in the doorway but as he was sitting opposite Teal'c the Jaffa could see the tension return to his face.

As much to tell Daniel Jackson who their visitor was as to welcome the newcomer, he said, "O'Neill. Have you come to meditate with me?"

O'Neill shuffled his feet awkwardly, clearly undecided as to whether to come in or not. "Um – nope. I think I'll pass on that, Teal'c buddy, if it's all the same to you. Just wondered if Daniel was with you?"

Pointedly not inviting O'Neill into the room, Teal'c cast an enquiring glance in Daniel Jackson's direction. The young man screwed up his face in a way which Teal'c interpreted as meaning that he would like more information before admitting to being present.

"Why do you wish to see him?"

O'Neill shrugged. "Just – you know – wondered how he was doing? He's been having kind of a rough time recently. Just wondered how he was."

"When I last saw him he appeared to be in perfect health, O'Neill."

"That's not what I…never mind. Just tell him I was – no, actually, don't bother. I'll catch up him with later." O'Neill made to turn away and then looked back. "Teal'c, has he – said anything to you?"

"On what subject?"

"You know – that other – me. Don't you think it was kind of weird that Daniel went off and did – that – with someone who was basically…me?" O'Neill held up a hand. "No, don't answer that. Just – tell him I was looking for him, okay?"

"I will certainly do so, O'Neill."

As the door closed, Teal'c saw Daniel Jackson wincing. He grimaced at Teal'c. "Well, I guess we all know how to completely mess with Jack's head now, don't we?"

"Your relationship with that other O'Neill does not necessarily have any relevance to your relationship with this O'Neill."

Daniel Jackson rose to his feet. "Right. You didn't kill those other Teal'cs out of self-hatred for your past self, and I didn't sleep with that other Jack because I wanted this Jack's attention."

Teal'c raised an eyebrow. "If that was your intention it has succeeded admirably, Daniel Jackson. You have been the focus of his attention ever since your return from that universe."

"Which would be why he took the battery out of his phone so I couldn't contact him again when you guys were fishing, of course."

Teal'c did sometimes wonder at the naivety of his companions. "Are you perhaps unaware how much it displeased O'Neill that you asked to speak to me rather than to him?"

Daniel Jackson blinked at him in obvious surprise. "Well, I needed help with a translation."

"Have you not noticed how greatly it irritates O'Neill when you make anyone other than himself the focus of your attention?"

"Well – yes – no – sort of. Is that what that is?" Daniel frowned in confusion. "I thought that was just Jack being – Jack."

Teal'c decided he had probably said enough. Daniel Jackson opened the door then hesitated. "I wish you'd stop beating yourself up about what happened in that other universe, Teal'c. All _you_ did was save me from – " He grimaced awkwardly.

"Myself," Teal'c said quietly.

The young man held up a finger. "'A fate worse than death' was more what I had in mind. For which I'm very grateful, by the way." After another pause he said gently, "I don't know how to prove to you that I don't feel any differently about you. I mean I'd suggest we share a sleeping bag on the next mission just to show how much I trust you, but I think Jack might get the wrong idea."

Teal'c smiled despite himself. "I am quite certain that he would."

Daniel Jackson smiled back at him. "Well, next time he's being particularly annoying perhaps we should try that just to have the fun of watching his reaction."

"Major Carter made the same suggestion while the three of us were stranded off world," Teal'c told him. "I believe it was after O'Neill had insisted on teaching her the art of…fishing." As the younger man reached for the door handle, Teal'c said quietly, "Daniel Jackson?"

He saw the tension in the man's body language but Daniel Jackson did not turn his head. "What?"

"What do you want from the O'Neill in this dimension?"

There was a pause before Daniel Jackson looked at him over his shoulder. "I don't know."

"You and O'Neill cannot repair the damage done to your relationship unless you both know what you want."

Daniel Jackson moistened his lips. "That's very true. But what if what I want from Jack isn't something he can give me?"

"What do you think you want?" Teal'c repeated it patiently.

The young man pulled a face, shrugging as he said casually, "Oh, I don't know, proof I matter to him as much as he matters to me? Stuff like that."

"You have had ample proof in the past of how much you mean to O'Neill."

"That's the point, Teal'c." Daniel Jackson gave him a brittle smile. "It was in the past. But I still care about Jack as much as ever I did. Probably more. God knows I've tried not to. I tried not to mind when he was on Edora and we had no way of reaching him or knowing if he was even still alive, and I tried not to mind when I thought he was walking out on me – on us – without a backward glance when he was doing the Asgard's dirty work for them. I tried not to mind when he was being electrocuted to death in a cage; then maybe still trapped on a burning space ship that I'd just watched fall into the sea; or when the two of you were trapped on a submarine he'd just made me give the order to blow up; or lost in a goddamned death glider with the air running out… Never really managed to learn that trick. I wish I could." He went out into the corridor and closed the door behind him.

Teal'c closed his eyes once more. If what Daniel Jackson needed from O'Neill was the proof that O'Neill cared for him as much as he cared for O'Neill then his needs exactly mirrored those of O'Neill. Each one appeared to be aggrieved with the other because of some imagined or actual neglect, but their relationship had become so intense over the years that it was now impossible for either one of them to forge a relationship with anyone else without it somehow impinging on their friendship. Teal'c felt they should have realized that for themselves a long time ago but it still seemed to come as a shock to them. So Daniel Jackson had not been able to embark upon a relationship with the woman who had once been Linea without greatly irritating O'Neill, and O'Neill had not been able to think himself romantically inclined towards Major Carter without leaving Daniel Jackson feeling hurt and neglected. Daniel Jackson had blundered confusedly towards some kind of remedy by allowing himself to become involved with a different O'Neill but it should surely have been obvious to him that the proof another O'Neill cared for him deeply was never going to fill the gap created by his fear that the O'Neill who mattered most to him no longer cared for him as he once had. 

For the moment then his friends were feeling hurt, irritated, and resentful of one another: which might have worried him had he not known how deep their affection for each other went. They might strive to conceal it and even manage to succeed for limited periods of time, but he had no doubt events would supply the evidence before too long which proved to both men how deeply one mattered to the other and how greatly each was cared for in his turn. 

This time as Teal'c allowed himself to sink back into his kelno'reem, he could see the depths of the ocean without any chill mist to envelope him, and the gulls were wheeling far away, only faint specks of darkness on a distant horizon.

***

 

I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers  
Tennessee Williams _A Streetcar Named Desire_

II: The Kindness of Strangers

 

Colonel O'Neill was definitely going to notice. Colonel O'Neill noticed _everything_. Daniel tried to conceal his throbbing hand as casually as possible but he didn't hold out much hope of getting away with it. The Colonel seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to injuries and not just about noticing them but being able to work out at once how Daniel had got them. Especially the ones Daniel had got doing things the Colonel had expressly told him _not_ to do. 

It wasn't that he deliberately disobeyed those order things the Colonel was always throwing around, the sensible ones he did try to listen to, but sometimes he didn't realize that they were orders at all, and sometimes when he did realize that was what they were he didn't always remember them until afterwards. It was very difficult, for instance, if he came across a fascinating Goa'uld artifact covered in hieroglyphs of a different dialect from anything he'd ever seen on Earth _not_ to reach out and run his fingers across it. The wonderful thing about hieroglyphs was that they were sensory as well as visual. How could anyone _not_ touch them when that was the way they naturally seemed to need to be read?

Daniel pushed his injured hand a little further under his jacket and risked a glance across the clearing. Being 'off-world' was starting to seem a little less strange to him. On nights when there were just the four of them all sitting around a campfire he could almost pretend he was back on Earth. Some days felt so much like old times on archaeological digs that he almost forgot they'd traveled to the site by Stargate. However, this trip out they had SG-2 with them, which meant they had Major Kawalsky with them, which was good, as Daniel liked Kawalsky, but also meant they had Robertson with them, which was bad, as Daniel didn't like Robertson at all. More to the point Robertson really didn't like him.

Colonel O'Neill had been what he called 'breaking him in gently' which meant taking him to places already investigated by previous Stargate teams and then letting Daniel 'run around and play' in the ruins of past civilizations. The Colonel had argued this was necessary work which needed to be undertaken to make up for all the archaeological, cultural and anthropological evidence previous SG teams hadn't been equipped to gather. Daniel thought that sounded reasonable. It seemed positively criminal to him that the only people who'd investigated some incredible sites had been soldiers with no anthropological knowledge. They'd videotaped a few things but they hadn't known what they were looking at and half the time they hadn't even got the important inscriptions in focus.

Colonel O'Neill had started him off by giving him tapes to review and asked him to try to identify any worlds which showed signs of having technology that might be useful against the Goa'uld. He'd been given four totally alien languages to look at, one of which he'd been told sounded like a variant of Latin, and asked if he could recognize any markings on any of the worlds visited which might correspond to those. 

The work had been fascinating and he could happily have spent a year just doing that. He'd found out afterwards that Ferretti had been of the opinion that was all he _should_ be doing. He thought an archaeologist should sit in an office in the SGC where it was safe then examine the artifacts they brought back to him. Although he would have been curious to learn how it felt to travel through the Stargate and would have been frustrated by always having to see everything secondhand, Daniel couldn't really argue with Ferretti's reasoning. It was true that he wasn't a soldier and he probably never would be one. Given the fact he had run digs in Egypt for years, he didn't think it was remotely fair to say he couldn't find north with a compass or that he wasn't safe to be let out without a keeper just because he didn't like shooting everything that moved, but he did acknowledge that there might be other people who were more obvious candidates to be part of a first-contact team than him.

But Colonel O'Neill had been adamant that he wanted Daniel on his team. Captain Carter had also stuck up for him in several arguments he really wished he hadn't overheard. General Hammond was kind to him and so was Major Kawalsky. But he knew that Robertson on Kawalsky's team thought he was a 'lump of geek deadweight' because he'd heard the man saying so. 

"Daniel?"

Daniel had already learned there were about a dozen different ways Colonel O'Neill could say his name. He'd gotten so it didn't give him that weird little shock when the man called him by his first name any more, well, much less of a shock anyway, but he still quite liked it. Most of the time. This, however, was not one of the times when he liked it. This was one of those times when that 'Daniel' carried a silent 'what have you been doing?' attached to it.

He winced. "Colonel?"

"What's wrong with your hand?" The man was across the campfire in a couple of strides.

Daniel tried to sink into the fallen tree he was sitting on. "Nothing," he muttered into his chest.

"Let me see."

He wondered if you could actually die of embarrassment. He didn't dare look up, already knowing what he'd see: Captain Carter looking sympathetic, Major Kawalsky looking concerned, everyone else sneering at him derisively.

He heard Robertson mutter something to Ferretti, too low for anyone to hear, probably only mild criticism, but he knew it was hostile all the same. One glance from Colonel O'Neill and Robertson was the perfect subordinate, but underneath there was a contempt for him, Daniel knew, just under the surface of that boot camp obedience.

Daniel said quickly. "Colonel, it's just a scratch, really I don't need you to – Oh boy…" He sighed in resignation to his fate as the Colonel caught his wrist, eased Daniel's hand out into the night air and shone his flashlight on it.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

The hint of exasperation in the Colonel's voice was bearable; it was the reproach behind it that Daniel hadn't confided in him which really hurt. When Daniel looked up into the man's face, the Colonel was studying his hand anxiously, already pulling out his medical kit. "How did you do this?"

"On the – " Daniel winced again, "um – on the…sarcophagus…" He tried to mutter 'sarcophagus' as quietly as possible but unfortunately the Colonel had the hearing of a bat to go with his clearly X-ray vision.

"The one I told you on no account to touch?"

There was a definite hint of steel in the man's voice and Daniel hunched up his shoulders. He hated rows. He couldn't help being curious; he'd just been born like that, and his parents had even encouraged him. They'd told him it was the sign of a truly enquiring mind. But his foster parents had always got angry if he asked too many questions. They'd told him to go and look it up and stop bothering them. And they had been even angrier about him touching things he wasn't supposed to. He still remembered the shock of picking up a shell on the seashore and his foster father smacking the back of his hand to make him drop it. He'd stared up at the man in disbelief; too shocked even to cry despite the fact no one had ever smacked him before. His parents had always told him that it was okay to touch as long as you were very careful not to hurt the thing you were handling. He hadn't damaged the shell at all. His foster father had waved it at him angrily. "It's a razor shell, Daniel. Don't you understand? It will cut you. What have I told you about touching things when you don't know what they are?"

"I forgot…" He muttered it now as he'd muttered it then.

Colonel O'Neill sank down onto his haunches in front of him, pulling antiseptic out of his Medkit. He looked up at Daniel for a second and then sighed. "Oh for crying out loud, Dannyboy, don't look at me like that. I just – there could have been a Goa'uld in the sarcophagus."

"There wasn't."

"You _opened_ it?"

Daniel winced more at his tone than the antiseptic being dabbed onto his palm. "I didn't actually open it. I was just trying to read the inscription and – "

The Colonel sighed again. "Yeah, I noticed. Beats me why a guy with so many degrees can't read without using his fingers. Just – be careful, okay? Some of those things could have booby-traps."

Daniel darted him a reproachful look. "I told _you_ that."

"Well, that just proves I listen, doesn't it?" The Colonel was already bandaging his hand with swift efficiency as he talked. "I'm not saying you can't study the…stuff you find, that's your job. I'm just saying you're the only anthropologist we have and I happen to like you in one piece not splattered all over the walls. So just bear that in mind the next time you want to start fiddling with things you don't understand." The Colonel tied off the ends with a flourish. "Okay, flex. Let's see some finger movement. Prove I haven't cut off the circulation to anything vital."

Daniel obediently opened and closed his hand for him. He darted the man a look from under his bangs, hoping his hero worship wasn't as obvious as he sometimes feared. He had no idea why Colonel O'Neill was as nice to him as he was. Because he was useful, he supposed. Because he had always had a gift for languages and ancient languages in particular, because he was unmarried, and pretty much unwanted by anyone, and such an academic failure, thanks to his way out theories, that he could be subsumed into the Air Force without anyone noticing. All of which made him a uniquely valuable property to the SGC. Which must be why the Colonel usually made himself count to ten and say something funny or only mildly critical instead of bawling Daniel out when he screwed up, or tripped up, or touched something he'd been told not to. 

But even though Daniel kept telling himself firmly that the Colonel was only being patient with him because General Hammond had probably told him to, it was very difficult not to get a little weak-kneed around a man like this who was so kind to him. 

Colonel O'Neill nodded in satisfaction and patted Daniel on the arm. "That's fine. Now eat something and then get some sleep. There's another temple place ten clicks from here we need you to take a look at tomorrow." As he straightened up, the Colonel added sternly, "But the first sign of infection in that hand and we're getting you out of here. You're irreplaceable, remember?"

"That's not what I heard." It was Robertson who said it but Ferretti was grinning too. 

O'Neill turned on the man in an instant, head jerking around interrogatively. "What's that supposed to mean, Corporal?"

Robertson looked discomfited. "Nothing, sir. I didn't mean to speak out of turn."

"But you did speak out of turn, Robertson, so finish what you started. What did you hear?"

"I heard that we only got Jackson because he reminded you of someone else, Colonel. Someone with the same DNA. That's what I heard."

Daniel turned to Colonel O'Neill in surprise. The man had his jaw set and his eyes were narrowed. Daniel was very glad he'd never looked at him the way he was looking at Robertson right now. "And so?" the Colonel said softly.

"And so I don't reckon he's irreplaceable. If he's a replacement for another Jackson with the same skills from a different universe then if something happens to him we could just get another one, couldn't we?" The look he gave Daniel wasn't exactly friendly. "All cats are gray in the dark."

As O'Neill started forward, Kawalsky was already on his feet and looming over Robertson threateningly. "You shut your mouth, Robertson. One more crack out of you and you are off my team, have you got that straight? The SGC needs Daniel a damned sight more than it needs you."

"If you say so, sir."

"It was only thanks to the other Daniel that the Goa'uld _didn't_ invade in his dimension," Kawalsky snapped. 

Captain Carter added shortly, "In fact, having analyzed the data the Colonel brought back so far, Daniel being a member of the SGC seemed to be one of the most important factors that had to be in place for any Earth to avoid destruction by Apophis."

Kawalsky nodded emphatically. "The Colonel and Captain Carter and me visited a lot of dimensions in the last few months, Robertson. I never heard about you making any difference one way or another in any of them."

Daniel blinked in surprise. He'd been told something about the quantum mirror by Captain Carter, and the concept of every single possibility being played out in an infinite number of dimensions actually made him uncomfortable. But what he did now understand was that he wasn't the first Daniel Jackson the Colonel had encountered. Something had been murmured about that at their first meeting, but it hadn't seemed either relevant or comprehensible back then. Now it was both.

He turned and looked at Colonel O'Neill, unable to banish the hurt accusation from his eyes. "Is that why you recruited me? Because a Daniel Jackson being a member of the SGC was a common factor in other dimensions which had managed to defeat Goa'uld attacks upon the Earth? Am I your…insurance policy?"

"No." The Colonel spun round to face him again, sinking down onto his haunches and putting his hands on Daniel's shoulders. "Definitely not."

"Then why did you recruit me?"

It was obvious Colonel O'Neill didn't want to have this conversation in public. He gritted his teeth then said quietly, "Because I met a you from a different dimension and he convinced me we needed to have an anthropologist on each SG team."

"He must have been very persuasive." Daniel couldn't remember the last time he'd felt quite this let down.

The Colonel's fingers tightened on his shoulders. "He was."

Daniel heard Kawalsky ask Captain Carter something about the naquada levels in the water she'd tested, clearly determined to give them some covering fire of conversation. She answered him in a voice slightly louder than necessary, going into lots of detail about the mineral deposits. Even with this sick feeling wrapped around his intestines, he was grateful to them both. Daniel looked up into those familiar brown eyes. "So, you wanted to find me because you liked the me you met from a different dimension?"

"Yes." Colonel O'Neill sat on the fallen tree next to him and sighed. "I liked him a lot."

"And as you couldn't have him on your team, you thought you'd get the nearest local equivalent?" Daniel tried to sound light and careless but he could hear the brittle undercurrent to his voice. 

"Pretty much. But that was then, Daniel. I may have tracked you down because of him, but you're on my team because of you."

He shrugged. "If you say so."

"I do say so." There was a pause and then Colonel O'Neill patted his leg awkwardly. "Get some sleep. We can talk about this back on base. Okay?"

No, it wasn't okay. It very emphatically wasn't okay. He was here as a replacement for someone else. Someone the Colonel had liked so much he hadn't wanted him to go back to his own dimension. Someone he'd liked so much he'd had to get himself a substitute in the hope that some day this imitation Daniel might turn into the Daniel he'd met in that other universe.

He wondered how long it would be before Colonel O'Neill realized this Daniel was never going to match up to that other Daniel; never be the Daniel he really wanted…

He realized the Colonel was still waiting for an answer. Daniel dredged up a smile from somewhere. "Okay."

The man gave him a last pat on the leg, said, "Night, Daniel," and then walked over to where Kawalsky was sitting.

Daniel headed for his tent but inside he was still reeling from the realization that to Colonel O'Neill this Daniel Jackson was always going to seem like second best.

 

The water from the showerhead was like liquid light bathing his naked body. It poured off silver-brown hair, cascaded from strong shoulders, glistened in graying chest hair like dew droplets on a cobweb. Daniel could see scar tissue, beige-pink against lean muscular flesh, old conflicts tracing themselves upon vulnerable skin. As the water fell in gleaming torrents over that so-familiar body, steam rose up to blur the outline of long legs, tantalizing as it spread a veil across that irresistible nestling of dark curls and hardening flesh. The Colonel put his head back to let the spray pour down his face and into his open mouth, eyes closing pleasurably before he ran a hand through his hair, sending more of the silver-blue stream cascading to caress his shining skin.

The Colonel blinked the water from his eyes, eyelashes spiking longer and darker than Daniel had ever seen them, and then turned his head. Their gaze met. Panic flared as Daniel realized he was caught, trapped in the searchlight beam of the older man's comprehension. He saw it register in those expressive brown eyes that Daniel had been standing there watching him shower. As Daniel opened his mouth to apologize, explain, to say that he would leave right away, and he was sorry, so sorry, he'd ever – Colonel O'Neill smiled then beckoned to him to come and join him under the gushing spray…

"Daniel…?" 

He tried to burrow back into his dream; he was wearing only a towel around his waist, walking towards the shower while Colonel O'Neill smiled and beckoned to him. Any second now he was going to throw aside the towel and feel that water cascade over his skin. Perhaps the man would – 

"Daniel…?"

He woke with a start to find a callused hand covering his mouth. There was a split second of panic and then he inhaled the familiar scent: Colonel O'Neill's aftershave. The relief was immediate although it almost frightened him how safe he immediately felt. The man whispered in his ear: "We've got company."

Daniel couldn't suppress a shiver of reaction as that warm breath tantalized his skin. He snatched a quick breath, wondering if Colonel O'Neill could hear the sudden acceleration of his heartbeat. Cautiously, he turned his head. There was a faint bluish light from the stars, silvering the older man's brindle hair, revealing a profile that had already become almost too comforting to bear. He kept telling himself he shouldn't rely on this man as much as he did, because one day he was going to turn around and find him gone. Just like all the others. He opened his mouth to say 'I understand' and the man's hand tightened automatically, silencing him. He licked his lips and his tongue brushed across warm fingers, tasting salt. As the Colonel moved in closer against him, he felt strangely light-headed. Again, hot breath caressed his ear. "No talking, okay?"

He nodded.

Colonel O'Neill put his cheek against Daniel's, evening stubble grazing Daniel's more-recently shaven skin. There was humor in that whisper: "Only for a little while. Don't want to kill you or anything." The hand was removed from his mouth and placed on his shoulder instead. "We need to move out now."

Daniel immediately climbed out of his sleeping bag; very relieved he'd only removed his socks and boots the night before. He reached for them in the darkness then pulled them on as fast as possible, his fingers made clumsy by the cold. The Colonel patted him on the shoulder reassuringly. "It looks like serpent guards but we may be able to outrun them."

Daniel felt his guts give an unpleasant lurch as he heard that 'may'. The Colonel was usually an eternal optimist. If he was only saying 'may' about their chances, they were definitely in trouble.

He risked a whisper as he got to his feet: "What do you want me to do?"

"Stay close to me." The response came back in a heartbeat as the Colonel led the way out into the chill night air of their camp, his fingers closed on Daniel's sleeve, like big brother charged with walking a younger sibling to school along a busy road. Daniel's heart gave a little lurch as he realized that was what he was to the man: the kid brother he'd never had. The civilian geek you had to watch out for or he'd get himself hurt. The smell of burning caught at Daniel's throat and he had to swallow hard to suppress the cough that so wanted to come. The campfire was sending a last few wisps of pale smoke into the darkness while stars swirled in unfamiliar constellations overhead. 

Again, warm breath gusted against his ear, making his hair flutter against his cheek: "And keep your head down. Remember what I told you earlier."

His teeth were already chattering with the cold and the shock of their situation, so perhaps it wasn't so surprising that his mind was a blank. The Colonel was always telling him things, how could he be expected to know which one he was supposed to be remembering? Grabbing an order at random he essayed: "Not to touch anything?"

"No." Colonel O'Neill's hand tightened on his arm and pulled Daniel after him into the trees. Daniel saw the brief flash of his smile in the starlight before the man whispered softly, "That you're irreplaceable…"

*** 

Teal'c suspected that the emissary from Zipacna might be a spy. He had suspected it for some days now. 

He'd been watching the young man called 'Len'tal' since his arrival, finding it something of a coincidence that he had arrived within days of Shak'l finding a Tok'ra spy within their midst. It was possible the last one had found a means to get a message out before being captured. Teal'c had been avoiding the torture chamber since then; a relief to him when the host had finally died under the over-zealous questioning of Apophis's priests. He doubted the symbiote would live much longer either. Teal'c had twice found the newcomer exploring parts of the pyramid he had no reason to enter. The young man had given him an apologetic smile and explained that he had become lost in the maze of corridors. He had a charming manner, a winning smile, and good looks; all things which would certainly explain the high regard Zipacna had for him. But Teal'c had long since learned not to judge people by appearances. The Goa'uld were invariably beautiful after all. Or at least the hosts they selected and enslaved were.

Standing in the Chamber of Ra – and he wondered how much it irked his lord Apophis to have his throne room named after a dead enemy – he could see Len'tal hovering in attendance to their god. The young man was politely questioning the wisdom of proceeding with this alliance with Heru'ur. Could Heru'ur be trusted? He had always been driven by ambition. A warrior with few weaknesses to exploit; unsusceptible to bribery or flattery. Would it not be better to seek an alliance with a Goa'uld Apophis might find it easier to manipulate…?

Teal'c knew he should share his suspicions of the young man with Apophis. And he would do so. As soon as he was certain. That was the only reason for this uncharacteristic delay. Despite Bra'tac's assertion on their last meeting, he would not secretly rejoice if Apophis were to be cast down into the pit of hell. It was his duty as a son to destroy the Goa'uld who had murdered his father and only as first prime to Apophis could he one day see Cronos brought low. He needed Apophis to be strong so that one day Cronos should be made weak.

"My Lord Apophis!"

Teal'c jerked his head round as the double doors of beaten gold were thrown back to admit an exultant Shak'l. The Jaffa hungered to be first prime and the triumphant glance he threw in Teal'c's direction as he entered the throne room suggested he thought that coveted position now lay much closer to his grasp.

"I bring you prisoners, my lord. Warriors of the hated Tau'ri."

Teal'c assessed the prisoners quickly and realized Shak'l had captured quite a prize for himself. Eight warriors from Earth. One female. Seven male. He recognized their long-legged gray-haired leader from previous encounters. His name was 'O'Neill' and he and Apophis disliked one another. The man was a survivor but he had obvious weaknesses: one day his need to protect those under his command would be his undoing, and, as someone who shared the same weakness, Teal'c recognized how dangerous a failing it could be. He had seen the woman before, as well. Apophis had lost Amaunet since their last encounter but found an earlier love and was now looking for a host for his new queen. He suspected Apophis would decide that his search was now over. Some of the soldiers also looked familiar from previous encounters but the young male who kept looking at 'O'Neill' as he was dragged across the chamber was someone Teal'c didn't recognize. 

"So, Your Just Won't Stay Deadness, how have things been going since the last time we kicked your snaky little butt?"

Teal'c wondered if O'Neill knew how transparent his strategy was. Yes, Apophis's attention was temporarily focused on him but O'Neill's mouth was now bleeding from that last blow of Shak'l's and Apophis wouldn't fail to notice the blonde female forever, however many insults O'Neill sent his way.

Shak'l forced his captives to their knees in a line in front of Apophis. The blonde woman was in between the two called 'Kawalsky' and 'Ferretti'. Teal'c was unsure which was which but he remembered O'Neill shouting those names on the last occasion the man had thwarted capture by escaping with his team back through the Stargate. She had her head bowed, which was a wise precaution as Apophis had an unerring eye for a beautiful woman, but it was not going to hold off his attention forever. O'Neill was still saying things to distract Apophis, recalling their last encounter in terms deeply unflattering to the Goa'uld. 

The young man kneeling next to O'Neill murmured, "Colonel, do you think it's a good idea to make him angry? Shouldn't we try to reason with him? You said he thinks he's a…god, right? Perhaps I should try to – "

"Not a word, Daniel. I mean it."

At the sound of unmistakable strain in O'Neill's voice, Teal'c blinked in surprise and for the first time wondered if at least some of O'Neill's anxiety was on behalf of this newcomer. Perhaps it wasn't just the woman O'Neill was trying to distract attention from. Perhaps he thought the one he called 'Daniel' was in the same danger as the female?

He looked at the young man with more interest and could immediately understand O'Neill's apprehension on his behalf. Although he was almost as tall as O'Neill and his shoulders were nearly as broad, for some reason the same uniform that fitted the other warriors so well seemed to swamp this one. He looked very young to Teal'c – although age was always hard to calculate in humans – perhaps a decade younger than O'Neill. Neither the glass circles he wore – presumably to correct some insufficiency of sight – nor the strands of light brown hair which drifted across his forehead, could disguise how big and blue his eyes were or how even and open his features were, while his skin had the irresistible glow of youth and health.

Teal'c wondered if this 'Daniel' realized how fortunate he was to be a captive of Apophis rather than Cronos or Heru'ur. The Goa'uld Teal'c served would probably order that he should be tortured for information and then executed, certainly, but he wouldn't think him suitable material for a host, nor would he find him desirable. Whatever O'Neill might fear on the young man's behalf, he was in no danger of being raped by his current captor.

O'Neill's palpable tension was sending out a beacon and Teal'c wasn't surprised when Apophis descended from his throne and began to walk down the line of captives. He deliberately started at the far end of the line from O'Neill, clearly wanting the man to suffer as those under his command were examined and their fate decided.

As Apophis glanced at each prisoner in turn he addressed O'Neill casually. "You will tell me the codes to penetrate the Earth's Stargate. You will tell me the location of the Tok'ra."

"I've been having a few short term memory problems," O'Neill retorted. "So I might find that a little difficult. Old age is a kicker, isn't it? But then, you'd know all about that."

Apophis nodded to Shak'l and the Jaffa zatted one of the soldiers who fell forward twitching with pain before lapsing into unconsciousness.

The one called 'Kawalsky' hissed, "You son of a – " before biting off the end of his sentence.

Apophis regarded O'Neill levelly. "Tell me the codes to penetrate the Earth's Stargate."

O'Neill gritted his teeth. "Like I said, I don't remember."

At a nod from Apophis, Shak'l fired the zat again.

Teal'c watched O'Neill jerk his head away, grimacing as the man's death clearly cut straight through him.

Apophis was level with the woman now. He put his hand to her jaw and pulled her head up. Out of the corner of his eye, Teal'c saw Len'tal go to take a step forward and then collect himself just in time.

The woman was staring up at Apophis defiantly but nothing could disguise how beautiful she was. Apophis was frowning in concentration. "You were once taken as a host."

"I was blended with a Tok'ra." She said it clearly. "Not a Goa'uld."

Apophis smiled. "Then there will be much that you can tell me of the Tok'ra."

"No." 

Teal'c saw the absolute determination in her eyes and felt something twist in his guts: mingled admiration and apprehension on her behalf. The Tau'ri were all proud, stubborn,  
and apparently suicidal. 

"But once you are the vessel of my new queen, you will be eager to share all you know, my child." Apophis smiled at her benevolently and stroked a hand through her golden hair.

O'Neill had his teeth gritted, brain clearly whirring to no effect. The young one called 'Daniel' was looking across at the woman with naked anxiety on his face. Teal'c watched as O'Neill nudged him with his elbow and the young man hastily averted his gaze and looked at the floor.

Teal'c watched with curiosity and rising sympathy as O'Neill became more and more tense as Apophis walked along the line towards him. He had the one called Daniel on his left side at the very end of the line and Teal'c felt certain that he would do everything he could to try to stop Apophis from even noticing the younger man existed if he could.

"So – Apophis, how are things going in Goa'uld Town anyway…?"

Apophis ignored O'Neill, stepping past him to stand before the young man. His eyes flashed briefly gold as he grated: "Who are you?"

The young Tau'ri looked up at him, moistening his lips before saying, "My name is Daniel Jackson. I'm a – "

Apophis ran his fingers through the young Tau'ri's hair, shocking him into silence. 'Daniel' darted a glanced at O'Neill, clearly asking for guidance but O'Neill was staring at Apophis with ill-concealed hatred. His expression had been wrestled into a blank mask but his body language screamed 'Even think about it and I'll kill you'.

Apophis smiled and Teal'c knew the Goa'uld was enjoying O'Neill's frustration even more than the young man's confusion. Apophis tightened his fingers in the silky strands of hair, forcing the young Tau'ri's head back so he could look into his eyes. Teal'c wondered if he was going to use the ribbon device on him, torture him in front of O'Neill to make him talk. O'Neill seemed to fear that possibility as well. Teal'c could see the older man tensing to spring although he wondered what good he thought it would do him when there were so many Jaffa around.

"Very nice." Apophis' smile widened. "Teal'c?"

Teal'c started at the sound of his name. He had been so much a spectator of this scene he had almost forgotten he might be required to become a participant. He stepped forward and bowed. "My Lord."

Still gazing at the young man with amused satisfaction, Apophis ran his fingers through his hair again. "I have found a suitable tribute to send to Heru'ur. You will take this one to him yourself and send him my salutations. Tell him I will think about his offer and in the meantime he may consider this Tau'ri slave his to do with as he likes: a token of my esteem." He released him and stepped back, his gaze falling on O'Neill with undisguised malice. "Thank you for bringing me two such useful prizes, human. You have now provided me with a host for my beloved and a gift for Lord Heru'ur."

The young man's obvious bewilderment made Teal'c flinch inside but he only nodded. "Yes, my lord."

O'Neill said tautly. "Don't do this."

"Tell me the codes to earth and I might change my mind." Apophis responded lazily.

O'Neill said, "I wasn't talking to you."

With a sense of shock Teal'c realized the man was looking right at him. There was desperation in those brown eyes but steel as well. O'Neill said, "You're Teal'c, right? I met another one like you once. He wanted to free his people from the Goa'uld. He came over to our side. You could do the same thing. Don't take Daniel to Heru'ur. Take him to Chulak and I'll come and find you both. You can join us. Please? Don't give Daniel to that son-of-a-bitch – "

Teal'c recovered from his sense of shock and backhanded the man across the face. "Never dare to question my loyalty to my god!" He seized the young man by the back of his jacket and yanked him to his feet. Then he bowed to Apophis. "I will take the Tau'ri slave to Lord Heru'ur at once."

Apophis inclined his head. "Prevent the boy from escaping, Teal'c, but there is no need to teach him the ways of his new god. Heru'ur will prefer to bend him to his will himself."

Still holding him firmly by the back of the jacket, Teal'c pulled the young man across the room. He came without much resistance, apparently too shocked to struggle, and was lighter than he looked. He kept gazing over his shoulder at the one called O'Neill. 

O'Neill put the back of his hand up to his bleeding lip, shouting after him: "The Goa'uld aren't gods, Teal'c, and you know that as well as I do. They've turned your people into slaves. Don't be part of that problem any longer. Be part of the solution…"

Teal'c hastily dragged the one called Daniel across the chamber and out into the corridor, slamming the door closed behind him, but even as the metal clanged its protest through the corridor, he could still hear O'Neill's words leaving burning echoes in his brain:

"You're a better man than this, Teal'c…! Help us to help you free your people…!"

In the torchlight of the corridor, Teal'c looked down at the young human and found the other staring at him with large blue eyes full of more curiosity and confusion than fear. He held out a hand. "I'm Daniel."

"I do not care who you are." Teal'c tightened his grip on his jacket and pulled him after him.

The Tau'ri stumbled but recovered his balance, saying a little breathlessly, "What about my friends? What's going to happen to them?"

"You should be more concerned with your own fate," Teal'c told him roughly.

"Well, that was going to be my next question." The young human gave him a flicker of a smile that was unexpectedly sweet. It reminded Teal'c of his son's smile and he felt the familiar knife in his guts twist a little harder. He yanked on the back of the young man's jacket roughly and felt a mixture of satisfaction and guilt as he stumbled. Teal'c pulled him back onto his feet before he could fall, making a point of displaying how easy it was for him to do so, how powerless the other was against him. However, the one called Daniel seemed to have no urge to argue the point that Teal'c was a great deal stronger than he was. He barely seemed to notice it, too fascinated by the hieroglyphs on the walls and intent on trying to get a look at them as Teal'c marched him past them. 

"Is Heru'ur the same as Horus in your mythology?" the young human enquired. "I mean does he occupy the same place in the pantheon of your…gods?"

"I do not understand your question," Teal'c told him shortly.

"Is Heru'ur the son of Ra and Hathor?"

"He is."

"Oh." After a pause, the young man said, "Would that be the same Ra and Hathor who – um…?"

"Whom O'Neill and your other companions killed?" Teal'c finished for him flatly. "Yes."

"And that's why Apep – Apophis thought Heru'ur would like me as a tribute? So Heru'ur can exact his revenge upon me? Because I represent the humans from Earth who killed his parents?"

Teal'c looked at him for a moment and realized this Daniel was serious. He really had missed the point of the entire threat and consequently completely failed to recognize the fate which now awaited him. He wondered if this one was half-witted in some way, then noticed the clear signs on intelligence in his face, the way he was clearly already translating the hieroglyphs on the walls, lips moving as he read across them. 

The one called Daniel was murmuring, "…So, Apophis and Seth were once united in their hatred of Osiris but then they became enemies because of Apophis' love for Seth's wife and sister Nephthys? That's not something I've ever come across in any earth mythology. Although there are accounts of Seth being able to thwart the 'eye of Apophis'. There was a relief in a temple in Edfu…" The young man gave his head a shake, moistened his lips again and looked up at Teal'c. "My friends? What's going to happen to them?"

"They will tell Apophis all they know of the Tau'ri."

"I think we both know that's not going to happen. And I think Colonel O'Neill is right about you. I think you know that what you call 'Apophis' is just an alien parasite inside a human host and not a god at all. Look, can we – I think we should talk." The young man dug in his toes, momentarily forcing Teal'c to halt. He gave him another nervous smile. "I think you're a good man and I don't think you want to do what Apophis has told you to do. My friends could help to free the people of Chulak. That's where you're from, isn't it? Chulak? You must know better than anyone that as long as the Jaffa continue to incubate the young of their oppressors they are contributing to their own enslavement – "

Teal'c yanked the young man after him with a decisive tug. "Your friends will be dead before daybreak and you should envy them their fate. It is kind compared to yours."

The young man darted him a sideways look, puzzled and yet still oddly fearless. Once again Teal'c was reminded uncomfortably of Ry'ac, and of children everywhere, too innocent and too curious to know when to be afraid.

***

Sitting in the corner of yet another Goa'uld cell, O'Neill wondered how many times he'd been in this situation before. And if this was the last time he'd ever find himself in this situation again: because from here on he'd be too busy being worm-food to ever need to worry about being captured.

He and Kawalsky were both nursing split lips and in his case a cut which bisected his left eyebrow from where they'd fought like maniacs to try to stop them taking Carter away. It hadn't done either of them any good. She'd been marched away by Jaffa who were apparently going to hand her over to handmaidens of old snakeface so she could be prepared for the great 'honor' the son of a bitch was going to do her. The same honor Heru'ur was going to grant Daniel. Except Carter knew the score and would be a Goa'uld by then anyway, so even though it was ripping out his guts like a steel claw to know what was awaiting her, it wasn't quite as bad as the pain of knowing what was awaiting Daniel who wasn't going to have a clue what was coming until Heru'ur…

O'Neill put his hands up to his head and wondered how he would ever be able to survive surviving this. For the first time he understood why men just gave up sometimes. They were almost certainly going to die here anyway; it would take a miracle to save them after all; Apophis was only keeping them alive so he could goa'uld Carter in front of them, probably before making her give the order to kill them. If he acted quickly enough, before their GDO codes were locked out, he could even make her give up the Earth. He knew Kawalsky was beating himself up over Casey's death as well, but Casey was a soldier and he'd died quick and clean. Carter was going to be a prisoner inside her own body; a body Apophis was going to fuck at the first opportunity. And Daniel was going to be…

He was so stunned by recent events he found his mind wandering off to think of other things, presumably unable to deal with the enormity of his current sense of failure. As he dabbed at his bleeding head with a handkerchief, the power of association made him think of the Daniel from that other dimension; the way those Jaffa had thrown him into the cell so casually. The shock of that face in the vulnerability of unconsciousness; the creamy skin, perfect mouth, long eyelashes; all that youth and beauty literally tossed at his feet. He'd felt a rush of indignation at their blatant…irresponsibility. Christ, he could have been anyone. This boy was almost ludicrously doable-looking and they put him in a cell with a trained soldier with a penchant for beautiful young men? What the hell were those guys thinking?

He smiled painfully at the memory of that Daniel; that weird combination of wariness and trust. Trying to treat him like a stranger but constantly forgetting to do so because, after all, he was 'Jack'. Much as he hated to admit it of that other O'Neill, the guy had clearly been doing a lot of things right over the years. He still felt a little weird about the first time he and the other Daniel had made love, because in the back of his mind there had been the unwelcome realization that this was something else that Daniel was just…letting Jack O'Neill do to him; not necessarily because he trusted the guy in the bedroom, the guy, who had encouraged him to remove his clothes, and then started that very slow and gentle exploration of his body, but because of that other O'Neill who'd never even kissed him. 

He had seduced the other Daniel as gradually and carefully as his Daniel handled ancient pottery; had used alcohol, compliments, kisses, nibbles, licks, strokes, and whispers, but ultimately the job had already been done for him. Which was perhaps why, strangely, his most vivid memory from that night was not the silken heat of oiled flesh on flesh, but from before then. The moment when he'd decided it was time to kiss Daniel again and he'd reached out to remove his glasses. The guy had just stood there and let him do it; mildly taken aback but no more than that. O'Neill had been granted a sudden flash of understanding in that instant that the other O'Neill did this sometimes; took them off, cleaned them, put them back on, probably with some exasperated little comment about Daniel ruining his eyesight. That was when he'd realized that whatever he and Daniel did in that big comfortable double bed, he would never be able to get as close to him as his doppelganger. Every time he kissed Daniel, touched Daniel, had sex with Daniel, he'd know that Daniel was letting him do it, trusting him to do it, feeling safe enough to enjoy him doing it, partly because of a completely different Jack O'Neill. 

"Well, Jackson certainly got himself taken out of the hot seat, didn't he?"

O'Neill jerked his head round and looked across at Robertson with unconcealed dislike. "Daniel is being given as a gift to Heru'ur, Corporal. That isn't something I would wish on anyone."

Robertson hit the bars. "With all due respect, sir, he's still better off than Casey."

Thinking of that corpse being dragged away by the ankles, the dead man's skull allowed to bounce carelessly against the stone flags, O'Neill grimaced but his tone was even, "Depends if you subscribe to the 'fate worse than death' theory really, doesn't it?"

"Well, the way Apophis was looking at her I guess Captain Carter's going to be able to tell us that herself." Robertson shook his head. "He's going to turn her into a _Goa'uld_."

"We all know the score here, Robertson," Kawalsky put in shortly. "We're thinking."

"Of what, Major? We're in a dungeon with no way out. Carter's going to spend the next four thousand years playing host to a snake unless some other SG-unit can put her out of her misery with a bullet. Even supposing the SGC survives at all. And we're all going to die. End of story."

O'Neill roused himself and rested a hand briefly on Robertson's shoulder, thinking of the grief the first time you lost a friend in the field, and how much it hurt. "It's not over until the fat lady sings."

Robertson tried to smile back. "I think she may be about to start, sir."

At the sound of serpent guards tramping along the corridor, he rose to his feet. Kawalsky did the same thing. They exchanged a glance, both reading the realization in the other man's eyes that this might really be it.

Kawalsky also tried to smile. "Guess it had to happen sooner or later, Colonel."

"We're not dead yet." He said it automatically but he didn't believe it. This time it was difficult to see any way forward. His only consolation was that the Teal'c in this dimension had looked like he might be weakening. The Jaffa hadn't manhandled Daniel even when he was urging him across the room and he thought he'd seen a flicker of concern wash across his face when Apophis had told him to whom he should deliver his captive. Perhaps Daniel's basic decency would get through to him where O'Neill's pleas hadn't. Perhaps…

"Your god awaits you!"

O'Neill looked the impatient serpent guard in the eye. He knew this Jaffa's name was Shak'l; he also knew he was a nasty son-of-a-bitch. Right now he also suspected the guy was among the prophets but he wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of letting him know O'Neill believed that. He gave him his best false smile and said, "Not necessarily."

 

As he was dragged towards what the one called Shak'l had referred to as the Chamber of Ra, O'Neill realized with a sense of shock that he was probably going to his death here, and he was thinking more about a boy he'd known for two months than a wife he'd known for two years. He was ashamed that he hadn't spared Sha're a thought until now. He'd always known he wasn't going to win any Husband of the Year awards but this was seriously shabby even by his standards. Christ, the poor girl loved him. The trouble was he didn't love her. He was fond of her, proud of her, aroused by her, but he didn't love her. 

Ka'ta'nefer – or Katy as he thought of her – he loved, unconditionally, unquestioningly. Loving his daughter had come as naturally as…

As loving Daniel Jackson. Damnit to hell! How could he care more about that bespectacled boy than he did about the woman who had given birth to his child? 

Sha're was going to tell their daughter so many lies about him after his death. She wouldn't even know they were lies because to Sha're they were immutable truths: He _was_ a hero to her, the slayer of Ra, the man who had freed her world and her people from the evil God who had enslaved them. He was brave and handsome and strong and good. She had unquestioningly accepted his insistence that he couldn't take her back to his planet with him. Kasuf had asked a few trickier questions but O'Neill had talked about the risks, how the people on his world weren't ready to hear about the Stargate, how Sha're might let something slip, the military would regard her as a security risk…At the time he hadn't thought he was lying. It was only when he'd been getting the whole damned SGC to bend every rule in the book so he could meet up with that other Daniel that he'd realized he could have brought Sha're back with him if he'd wanted to. The truth was he hadn't wanted to. And he never was going to want to.

It was meeting the two Daniels which had put it into perspective for him. The way the Daniel from the other dimension had gazed at the photograph O'Neill had shown him of _his_ Sha're with such wistful longing. Handing it back to him with that sigh of regret; the look on his face, making a knot of shame twist in O'Neill's guts because here was a husband of Sha're who had truly loved her, clearly always _would_ love her, and yet had lost her to the Goa'uld, while he, who had her still, was almost indifferent to his good fortune. That had certainly given him a jolt.

Then there was the way he felt around his own Daniel. His eagerness to see him every day, the pleasure he took from his company, the way he thought about him so often, felt happier whenever he was with him. That was the way a man should be about his wife, not his teammate. It had brought it home to him how rarely he ever spared Sha're a thought. He suspected she thought of him often, probably even dreamed of him, while he spent his nights dreaming of Daniel.

Sha're had become little more than a guilt source to him. Something to prick at his conscience at four in the morning. He'd probably known for a while he should go back there and tell her she was wasting her life waiting for him, that he was never going to retire to Abydos as he'd half-jokingly suggested, that he was never going to be worthy of her. Giving up Sha're would mean giving up Katy. If Sha're remarried, Katy would think of another man as her father, and that would hurt; that would hurt like hell, but the alternative was Sha're staying single, raising a child without assistance, and Katy growing up with an absent father who only remembered her on special occasions. 

Sha're was a young, beautiful woman and the daughter of Kasuf, yet she was alone for far too many hours of every day. Along with saving her people from Ra, O'Neill had effectively ruined her chances of ever being with a man who was worthy of her. That was a wrong he'd done her which he needed to put right. 

As he was snapped out of his reverie by the realization they were now back in the Chamber of Ra, O'Neill realized the wrong was going to be put right without any need for him to do anything, because in a few minutes Sha're was going to be a widow.

***

Looking around at the gray-green scrubland through which they were trudging, Daniel decided that he needed to rest and he'd been quiet for quite long enough. Admittedly, the Jaffa who was his apparently somewhat unwilling escort had told him he was _going_ to remain silent and that they would not stop until they had reached the palace of Heru'ur, but Daniel was definitely of the opinion that Teal'c was wrong on both counts. 

Before he had taken him through the 'gate, Teal'c had put a golden collar around Daniel's neck and then pointedly pressed something on a control device, causing what felt like a small electrical charge to course down Daniel's spine. It hadn't actually caused him pain, but it had been a disagreeable sensation and he'd held up his hands in supplication, saying, "Okay, I get the hint." He gathered without needing to be told that the device could be used to administer a much nastier jolt if he gave the Jaffa any problems, but that threat had only been implicit. He was sure that almost any other man in Apophis' employ would have given a more painful demonstration of the collar's capabilities, and he'd thought again of what Colonel O'Neill had said about this Jaffa being their ally in other dimensions. 

There had been priests and Jaffa of Heru'ur awaiting them as they came through the 'gate. Daniel had tried to follow the conversation but the pronunciation was very different from the way he would have expected. The Egyptian Sun God he had been schooled to think of as 'Re' was very emphatically 'Ra' in the language of the Goa'uld, for instance, and many of the other vowel sounds followed completely different paths from the ones he would have expected. Colonel O'Neill had tried to give him a crash course in understanding Goa'uld, but the Colonel couldn't write the language either in hieroglyphs or any transcripted form, only speak it, and had a fairly limited vocabulary even then, so trying to get his assistance on Goa'uld texts was a little like asking someone who'd picked up some colloquial Greek on vacation to help with a translation of The Odyssey.

From what Daniel had been able to follow, the Horus guards had greeted Teal'c with initial suspicion but been somewhat mollified by the explanation that Teal'c was here to take a gift to their lord, Heru'ur. Daniel also got the impression from their body language as much as their words, that Teal'c was someone the Horus guards feared, which perhaps explained why they had agreed to let him through. They had offered to take Daniel off his hands but Teal'c had told them with great emphasis that he had been commanded to deliver Daniel to Heru'ur himself. One of the Horus guards had run some kind of Geiger counter type object over Daniel, apparently to check for naquada levels, and then waved them through while saying something else that had sounded like a warning but which Daniel hadn't been able to understand at all.

From then on Teal'c had seemed intent on setting some kind of land speed record and it had taken all of Daniel's energy just to keep up with him. He had tried asking several questions, of course, as well as urging Teal'c to turn around and go back to the 'gate, but Teal'c had told him to hold his tongue and move faster or else.

Daniel _had_ spoken since this last edict, of course, because it was important that he made this Teal'c person realize that he was doing the wrong thing, and they were going the wrong way. They needed to be going back to where Apophis was so they could rescue Colonel O'Neill, Captain Carter, Major Kawalsky and the others before Apophis killed them. But on the last occasion he'd pointed this out to Teal'c – which had admittedly been after he'd been told not to open his mouth again if he wanted to keep his tongue – the Jaffa had hit him open handed around the back of the head, knocking him down.

Daniel had been so surprised that he had just lain there for a moment, gaping at Teal'c in disbelief. The Jaffa had grimaced, shaken his head as though engaged in some internal argument, then abruptly reached out, grabbed Daniel by the back of the jacket one-handed and hauled him to his feet. "Now be quiet!" he'd insisted.

Putting a hand up to the back of his stinging head, Daniel had looked at the Jaffa in reproach. "I was only say – "

"Be silent!" The Jaffa had roared it at him so forcefully that Daniel had decided that perhaps he would be quiet for a little while. He would give Teal'c some time to think over the things he'd said earlier and then try again.

It was now definitely time to try again. "I need to rest," he offered.

"Be silent."

"I can't keep up with the pace you're setting. I need to sit down."

"Be _silent_!"

"Okay." Daniel decided to let actions speak louder than words and sat down where he was, folding his arms and staring up at the Jaffa mutinously.

Teal'c wheeled around at once. "On your feet!"

"No." Daniel glared at him. "I'm tired and I need to _rest_. And we're still going the wrong way anyway. You don't want to deliver me to Heru'ur, you want to – "

As the tall Jaffa loomed over him, Daniel decided he might have gone a little far this time and tried to make his body language as submissive as possible. He kept his head down, determined not to make eye contact or to appear to be challenging Teal'c's authority. He was aware of a hand being raised and hunched up his shoulders in readiness even though he couldn't quite believe this man was really going to hit him again – Teal'c had such an intelligent face and he was clearly battling his unwilling compassion for his captive at every step. 

He was proven right, as the blow remained undelivered. Teal'c said something in Goa'uld which Colonel O'Neill had taught Daniel when they'd both had a little too much to drink. Daniel winced. There were some verybad words in there. He decided to keep his head down a little bit longer. When the Jaffa strode away from him to survey the surrounding countryside he was reminded of Colonel O'Neill doing the same thing on missions sometimes, saying: 'Daniel, I am going to go and stand over here now, so there is no possible way that I can _swat_ you!'

Although Colonel O'Neill was usually kind, good-humored, and strangely comforting to be around, every now and then he did lose his temper, and it always seemed to be Daniel he lost it with. The last occasion had been on P4X-731. 

They'd been in the middle of investigating a temple – possibly of Sumerian design although unfortunately he'd never been given long enough to find out – when Horus guards had attacked. Daniel had dropped his video camera as they ran for the gate. He'd gone back for it, not because he had the survival instincts of a _lemming_ ,as Colonel O'Neill had later suggested, but because it had irreplaceable film of a wall of inscriptions that had dissolved within a few minutes of their exposure to the air. The Horus guards _had_ been a little closer behind than he'd anticipated and okay, yes, he _had_ slightly miscalculated how far a blast from one of those staff weapons could travel, but the first shot had barely singed his arm, the second had only done any real damage to his pack and vest, and the third, thanks to him tripping over that fallen tree, had gone right over his head. And the fall had only given him a _mild_ concussion anyway. The important thing was that he'd managed to get the video camera, thereby preserving a record of something otherwise lost forever. Colonel O'Neill however had not seen the situation the same way Daniel had at all. In fact Colonel O'Neill had run back shouting at him, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, then practically thrown him into the wormhole. 

Back in the 'gateroom with the iris firmly closed on those pursuing Horus guards the Colonel had first yelled for a medic and then continued yelling at Daniel while frenziedly pulling off Daniel's smoldering pack and vest.

Daniel had been forced to hang on tight to his t-shirt or Colonel O'Neill would have ripped that from his back in full view of everyone along with his – admittedly slightly burned – pack, vest, and jacket. The man had still yanked his t-shirt up to check out his back for injuries and then emitted a weird little gulping sound which it had taken Daniel a long time to realize had probably been relief. Then the man had spun him round and told him very loudly what he'd do to him if he _ever_ and he meant _ever_ went back for something he'd dropped when there were freakin' Jaffa on his freakin' heels _ever_ again.

Daniel had surprised both of them by yelling right back at him that the only way they were going to defeat an enemy who had risen to its current technological heights by borrowing from other cultures was by studying the cultures the Goa'uld had borrowed from, Colonel! 

Which was when General Hammond had hurried in and demanded to know what the problem was, then seeing Daniel's still smoking vest on the floor and the bruise coming out on his forehead, had insisted that Daniel was taken to the infirmary at once. As no one argued with the general when he used that tone, Daniel had found himself bundled onto a stretcher by Doctor Fraiser's medics before he could protest that he could walk perfectly well. He'd then been fussed over and thoroughly scolded by Doctor Fraiser as she cleaned and bandaged his arm, shone things into his eyes, dabbed things onto his head, and strapped up an ankle she insisted was sprained. Then he'd been fussed over and scolded again by Kawalsky, who had told him off for 'scaring the Colonel like that', which Daniel had thought was especially unfair. No one seemed to be able to grasp that all he'd been doing was going back for a vital piece of equipment which carried what was now the only surviving record of a vanished civilization, not deliberately trying to get himself killed. Even Captain Carter, who he could usually count on to be an ally, had made him feel bad by hovering anxiously by his bedside and telling him at least three times how much it upset the Colonel when he got himself hurt. 

Later, Colonel O'Neill had come into see him. He'd fidgeted all round the bed, tapped Daniel's drip apparently to see what it did, then asked if Daniel wanted the Colonel to try to break him out of the infirmary? Daniel had still been feeling hurt by the way the man had shouted at him but at the thought of not having to spend a night in the infirmary he'd forgotten about feeling aggrieved and had mumbled a semi-apologetic 'yes, please'. 

Colonel O'Neill had sped off with great alacrity, then returned with Doctor Fraiser in tow, his long legs covering the ground at twice her speed. He'd told Daniel she would only release Daniel into his care but it was okay because he'd promised to keep an eye on him. Doctor Fraiser hadn't looked thrilled but she had given a reluctant nod of assent. Daniel had been out of the bed so fast he'd almost toppled over and the Colonel had grabbed him quickly, told Doctor Fraiser he wasn't really dizzy just incredibly eager not to miss that night's hockey game, and then whisked him up to his jeep in double quick time.

Once he had Daniel in his own home, Colonel O'Neill had insisted on telling him lots of excruciatingly dull things about hockey, then made him drink lots of horrible-tasting domestic beer until the room was spinning so hard when he stood up Daniel felt like he was on a carousel. Then when they'd moved on from beer to whisky and were both pretty soused, they'd watched the worst soap opera they could find with the sound turned off while making up their own dialogue, until Daniel was so weak with laughter he'd slid off the couch and ended up in an untidy heap on the floor. For a reason Daniel still couldn't fathom, it had been one of the best evenings of his life.

Sitting on the damp ground of an alien world, Daniel's smile at that memory faded almost immediately into a painful grimace. He jerked his head up and looked at the tall Jaffa accusingly. "You know Apophis is evil. You know he's enslaved your people. How can you serve an alien parasite against your own kind?"

Still scanning the horizon Teal'c said impassively, "You care nothing for my people. You care only for your friends."

"Yes, I do care for my friends but I care for your people as well. I care for all people who are enslaved by the Goa'uld. Why don't you help us to defeat them?"

Teal'c turned and looked at him. "What makes you think they can be defeated?"

His dispassionate tone surprised Daniel. In this Jaffa's culture, surely Daniel's words were blasphemous, and yet this Teal'c wasn't acting as though he was offended or his belief system was being destroyed the way he had back in the Chamber of Ra. That had clearly been an act for Apophis. Daniel blinked in surprise. "You know Apophis isn't a god, don't you? But if you're not serving him because you think he's a god, why do you follow his orders?"

Teal'c strode towards him, tossing his staff weapon from one hand to the other. "Can you not believe me capable of serving him for my own self interest?"

Daniel looked up at those chiseled features and wondered if he'd ever seen a face that had integrity more clearly written in any line. Of course appearances could be deceiving as he had spent his college years telling bar tenders who refused to serve him alcohol, but all the same… "No, I can't."

"Then you are mistaken."

Daniel moistened his lips. "Off the top of my head I can't think of any good reason to serve a megalomaniacal alien parasite but perhaps you have one. But whatever it is you feel you need to do, saving my friends is more important."

"Why?"

"Because if anyone can defeat the Goa'uld it's Colonel O'Neill." 

"The people of your world have no weaponry or technology to match that of the System Lords."

Daniel grimaced. "True, but we're fast learners and we're very…stubborn. Please help me to help my friends."

Teal'c looked at him for a long moment. "If your O'Neill is the man you think he is then he should be capable of saving himself. If he is not capable of saving himself then is not capable of defeating the Goa'uld and he is therefore of no use to me."

Daniel blinked in surprise. He opened his mouth to argue then closed it again. "Okay – that's fair enough, but just on the off chance that the Colonel is having a…bad day today, _please_ can we go back there and help him and Captain Carter?"

The Jaffa came over to him and said impassively. "You should have faith in your leader."

"I do."

"Then you have no reason to concern yourself."

After a long pause, Daniel looked up. "Are you going to deliver me to Heru'ur?"

"Yes."

Daniel set his jaw. "Why?"

"Because to receive such a gift from Apophis will please Heru'ur and I greatly desire that the alliance between Apophis and Heru'ur should be successful."

"Why?"

"You ask too many questions."

"But – "

Teal'c grabbed him by the back of his jacket and yanked him to his feet. Daniel was starting to find the way the Jaffa did that one-handed and without any visible effort a little insulting. Perhaps Major Kawalsky had a point. Perhaps he shouldwork out occasionally. Teal'c said shortly, "If you cause me any problems, I will be forced to use this." He held up the control device for the collar.

Daniel grimaced. "You don't want to do that."

"Then do not make me."

"I'm _tired_ ," Daniel protested, then winced as he realized he sounded like a whiny kid. 

A second later he realized that sounding like a whiny kid was clearly not the worst strategy he could have come up with when Teal'c flinched and immediately pushed the control device back into a pouch in his serpent guard uniform.

"If we do not reach the palace of Heru'ur tonight we will be forced to sleep in the open."

With a mixture of surprise and hope, Daniel realized that rather than planning to drag him along by the hair, Teal'c was resigning himself to not to reaching their destination in time; the Jaffa was already preparing for what that would entail.

Daniel said, "Well, I'm in no particular hurry to reach the palace of Heru'ur so sleeping in the open sounds good to me."

"It becomes very cold on this world at night," Teal'c told him sternly.

Daniel looked at the hillside they were in the process of climbing, legs aching at the prospect. "We can make a fire, can't we?"

Teal'c glanced at him over his shoulder, face impassive. "That will be a necessity in any case," he said.

Daniel frowned and pushed his hair out of his eyes. He hadn't liked the way Teal'c had said that. He shot the Jaffa sideways look. "Why?"

Teal'c said briskly, "Because otherwise we will undoubtedly be eaten alive."

This time as the Jaffa strode purposefully up the rocky hillside, Daniel decided that it might be a good idea to keep up.

***

O'Neill swore as he was shoved to his knees in the Temple of Ra once again. "Don't you bozos have cartilage?" he demanded.

He looked up at Apophis who was sitting there radiating smugness on his golden throne. Jaffa everywhere, priests everywhere, two locked doors, and five captives on their knees in front of him. Snakeboy was clearly having a really good day.

"I'm just lulling you into a false sense of security," O'Neill told him.

A heavy-handed clout around the back of the head told him to be quiet. He hadn't taken to this Shak'l character much from the outset, and gestures like that really didn't increase his liking for him. Of course, their relationship hadn't got off to the best possible start when the Jaffa had captured SG-2 and Ferretti, then held a staff weapon to Kawalsky's head and called out that O'Neill had ten seconds to show himself before he killed the others.

Hiding in the undergrowth with Carter and Daniel, O'Neill had groaned inwardly. He'd met Carter's eye and seen her gaze flicker to Daniel then back to him, asking a question. "If it was Robertson, I'd let him pull the trigger," O'Neill had said aloud. He nodded to her. "Try it." Then he'd turned to Daniel who had that tight closed-off look on his face he got when he didn't like what was happening, arms wrapped around his body. "Go with Carter, do what she says."

"But, Colonel…"

"Daniel," he'd said it as close to sharply as he was capable of being with Daniel. "Just this once do what you're told. Please."

Then he'd got to his feet before Daniel could argue with him any more, holding his hands up, talking a load of wiseass crap he couldn't even remember now as he walked slowly towards Shak'l, trying to make as much noise as possible so they wouldn't hear Carter and Daniel hopefully making their escape.

But Shak'l had clearly been one step ahead of him, sending a pincer movement of Jaffa round to the west to catch any stragglers. They'd been ten minutes along the road to Apophis' pyramid with him just daring to hope Carter and Daniel might have gotten away, when four Jaffa had appeared out of the bushes, yanking his two teammates along with them. 

He was sure he'd given himself away then, the stricken look on his face when he saw Daniel being manhandled by a couple of Jaffa telling not just their enemies but everyone who hadn't already realized it that this boy had started meaning far too much to him. Kawalsky had given him a look of apology and O'Neill had swallowed hard, patting the guy briefly on the shoulder. "Not your fault."

He'd said the same thing to Carter when she'd given him that glance and breathed hoarsely, "I'm so sorry, Colonel, I just didn't hear them…"

Another pat, another murmured reassurance. "Not your fault, Captain. Thanks for trying."

It had been no one's fault. It happened. It was part of what being in the SGC was about. Part of the job. Roll with the punches, O'Neill, take it on the chin. Except this time he couldn't. He couldn't get over a woman under his command being turned into a Goa'uld right in front of him, and he sure as hell couldn't get over the very innocent young academic he'd promised to take care of being dragged off by the hair to be raped by Heru'ur.

The pain in his knees was receding now but he almost wished it would come back. At least when he was thinking about that he couldn't think about what Heru'ur would do to Daniel. Heru'ur was a warrior; fit; determined; the type to go out and grab a planet in the morning then come home and play hard all night. Someone used to obedience but who'd probably enjoy breaking Daniel's spirit. Hard to know if he'd be the kinky type or if he'd just be impatient for what he wanted and would go for the most direct route: beat Daniel into submission, then chain him to the bed, then fuck him bloody. Then do it again. And again.

O'Neill jerked his head away from that thought hating the Goa'uld with a savagery he'd never known before. Round about now, if his wrists hadn't been tied behind his back, he really thought he was capable of ripping out Apophis' lungs with his bare hands, then strangling him with them. Even now he was wondering how much damage he could do with his teeth before the son-of-a-bitch Jaffa pulled him off the guy.

"Behold, my future queen…" Apophis' voice was rich with triumph and lust.

"That guy is so overdue for a bullet in the brain," Kawalsky growled next to him.

"Get to the back of the queue," O'Neill retorted. But he couldn't stop his gaze following the Goa'uld's, his heart sinking to somewhere around his toes as he saw Carter dressed in something gold and slinky and wearing way too much eye-make up. With the torchlight haloing her hair and her blue eyes wide and blank, she looked almost unbelievably beautiful. She also looked nothing like the woman he knew. She was just a husk now. A lovely outer wrapping for the nasty little cargo she was going to be carrying from now on. He wondered what the hell they'd drugged her with to give her that robotic look.

"Nishtar…" He heard the word murmured with satisfaction by Shak'l and his heart gave a little jump.

O'Neill tried to keep his face absolutely blank but his brain was going into over-drive. He darted another look at Carter and that flicker of hope faded a little. She looked exactly like you would expect someone to look who'd been drugged by the Goa'uld: vacant, compliant, without freewill. Except, it couldn't be Nishtar because she was immune. So was he. So were Kawalsky and Ferretti. Their little run-in with Seth had seen to that. Which meant there was just a faint chance Apophis had tried to drug Carter and failed, and she was faking.

He bowed his head so they wouldn't see the hope flaring. _Please God, let her be faking._ He wrestled his face back under control then jerked his head up, giving Apophis a look of loathing, trying to come across like a guy who knew his teammate was going to be possessed by a snake right in front of him and was making a poor attempt to pretend he didn't care. Not too much of a stretch under the circumstances.

Darting a glance back at Carter, he saw there was a hooded figure keeping very close to her. He'd seen his eyes glow gold when they'd first been dragged into this chamber so the guy was obviously a minor Goa'uld. Some underling of Apophis' who, judging by his clothing, occupied the position of head priest. He was presumably the guy who was going to produce the snake Apophis wanted to put inside Carter.

As he watched, the hooded figure produced an ornately decorated jar and then moved in front of Carter. Apophis was watching with a satisfied smile playing on his lips, eyes glowing gold in anticipation. Any second now he was going to have his queen back again, his beloved Nephthys, someone who, according to the Tok'ra, was one of the biggest bitches around. And O'Neill was going to lose the best 2IC he'd ever worked with, unless…

His gaze was riveted on Carter, willing her to be faking this, willing her to have a plan, but as the priest lifted the top of the jar and he saw the wriggling white creature begin to emerge, he realized this really was going to happen. Captain Samantha Carter really was going to be turned into a Goa'uld and there wasn't a damned thing he could do to stop it.

O'Neill hadn't realized he'd thrown himself forward until he became aware of the staff weapons crossed in front of him bruising his chest, the zat gun pressed against his temple, the hand in his hair, yanking his head back, Shak'l's malevolent warning hissed in his ear. He was aware of Kawalsky and Ferretti struggling like maniacs; Kawalsky yelling a lot of things that would definitely have earned him a Goa'uld firing squad if he hadn't already been marked for death anyway; Robertson being hit round the back of the head with a staff weapon.

With his head twisted back it was hard for him to see, but out of the corner of his eye he could just make out Carter passively bending her head. It was going to rip into the back of her neck…Then he saw her open her mouth and the white snake wriggle out of the jar and plunge down her throat.

"No!"

He didn't even know he was the one yelling it out of a raw throat until Shak'l hit him again.

Apophis' gaze flickered across to him, malevolent, smug. "She is ours now."

"Just because you stole her body for your snakebitch mate doesn't make her yours!" Except it did, of course. He could yell all he liked but the fact remained Carter was Apophis' now. She was Nephthys and their enemy, and all her CO could do for her was put a bullet in her brain.

Carter straightened up and the golden glow in her eyes banished the last faint hope. Her voice grated as she looked O'Neill in the eyes and said, "Bow before your queen."

Apophis smiled and stretched a hand up to her face, brushing the back of his fingers lightly down her cheekbone. "Mine."

The gaze she turned on him was loving and submissive. "My Lord, I beg you to give me the pleasure of disposing of these gadflies."

"Of course, my love." He slipped the ribbon device from his own hand and held it out to her.

O'Neill watched as Carter pulled on the hand device as though it was a glove. The sick feeling in the pit of his stomach would be gone soon, that was something. Everything would be gone soon. He wouldn't have to taste the failure of having let his teammate be taken for a host, or the despair because Daniel was going to be raped by Heru'ur. Very soon there would only be darkness. There might even be peace but somehow he doubted it. He suspected his soul was going to spend eternity screaming in torment because of those two wrongs against his teammates, which he would never now be able to put right.

As she advanced towards him, arrogant gaze fixed upon his face, he wondered if Carter was still in there somehow; if she was screaming out a 'No!' to echo his that only Nephythys could hear.

When she raised her hand ribbon device, he looked her in the eyes, wanting the Carter that might still be in there to know he didn't blame her. He saw her hand glow gold, felt warmth against his forehead as the light touched his skin, remembered what the other Daniel had told him about the way it felt as if a red hot egg whisk was churning your brain; waited for the inevitable – 

That was when Carter spun round on the balls of her feet with a precision that looked all Air Force, hand upraised and outstretched to send a cannonball of light straight into the heart of Apophis.

O'Neill saw the shock and disbelief on the serpent god's face as he was picked up and thrown against the far wall like a scarecrow flicked aside by a tornado. Carter's second blast from the ribbon device embedded Apophis in the wall. Horribly, he wasn't quite dead yet; there was still shock in his eyes, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly. O'Neill stared at him in horrified fascination, then thinking of his host, the massive trauma he was currently undergoing, the chill wave of coming death sweeping through him, he shuddered and wrenched his attention back to Carter instead. 

She was already fixing the astonished Jaffa with a gold-glowing gaze. " _I_ am your queen now. You will obey only me."

He held his breath, wondering if this coup d'état might actually be bloodless, but then Shak'l was bringing up his staff weapon and so were some of the others. The Jaffa snarled: "You have murdered our lord!"

O'Neill body-slammed him with everything he had, and saw Kawalsky crack his forehead hard against that of a Jaffa who was also leveling his staff weapon on Carter. A hot blast from the ribbon device sent another Jaffa smashing into the wall behind them but he didn't know how many she could deal with. He didn't know who _she_ was: a Nephthys who wanted it all, or a Carter managing to hang onto her own sentience because of some lingering remnant from Jolinar, but whoever she was, the outer casing was one of his Air Force officers and he really wanted to keep her intact. "Use the personal shield thing!" he yelled at her.

The glance she shot him seemed all Carter: that surprise he could possibly have had a good idea definitely looked like it came from his too-clever-too-bear-some-days second-in-command. But whoever she was, she was acting on it; slamming a hand down on her wrist to activate a shimmering cocoon of light.

O'Neill was trying to fight his way out of his bonds, desperate to get his hands free, but even as he struggled, he saw a Jaffa snatch up a knife and run towards her.

"Carter! Watch out!" 

"Captain Carter!"

He and Kawalsky both shouted at the same time but they had no way of reaching her. He saw her turn, her eyes widen as she realized someone was coming whose weapon would be able to penetrate the barrier –

The priest was a blur of snakeskin; there was the eye-piercing flash of a blade; then the Jaffa's knees crumpled and he fell to the ground, blood spilling from his mouth and guts. As the larval Goa'uld in his pouch wriggled out and leapt for the first living body it saw, the priest's knife flashed a second time and the Goa'uld fell to the ground, sliced in two.

As he snatched up the fallen Jaffa's staff weapon, the priest's hood fell back to reveal cropped fair hair, and familiar chiseled features.

"Martouf?" O'Neill gasped it in disbelief.

As O'Neill stared at the Tok'ra in astonishment, Martouf leveled the staff weapon on him and fired.

He swore he felt the blast singe him a new center parting, but when he jerked his head round there was a dead Jaffa behind him. 

Martouf called across to Carter, "Samantha, is Apophis dead?"

She darted a worried glance at the wall. "Almost."

A second later, Martouf was at his side, slicing through his bonds. "We must leave immediately," the Tok'ra told him rapidly. "The second Apophis' heart stops beating, the palace will explode."

"What?" As he jerked his hands free, O'Neill realized there was no time for explanations. He took the staff weapon Martouf thrust into his hands and then the Tok'ra was darting along the line of captives to cut the others loose. 

He was aware of Carter covering his back as she blasted serpent guards with her ribbon device, but he was too intent on giving Martouf some protection to be able to think about anything else. There were serpent guards hammering on the barred golden door, but for the moment at least the locks were holding. It was only as the last Jaffa in the room hit the floor with a staff blast through his midriff, smoke curling in the air like a question mark while the smell of singed flesh assailed his nostrils, that he realized their way to the Stargate lay on the other side of that locked door. For the first time he risked a glance at his 2IC. "Carter?"

She gave him a weary smile. "It's still me, sir. It's just someone else as well."

"What?" he looked at her in disbelief.

"Samantha is host to Khenera now." Martouf caught his arm. "There is no time for explanations, Colonel. If we are not off this planet in the next few minutes we will soon be spread across what remains of its surface."

"What about the Stargate?" he demanded.

Martouf gave him a look of exasperation. "The Stargate will be the first thing to blow up. We must leave by tel'tak."

"But, Daniel…?"

"Sir, there really isn't any time. When Apophis dies we're going to die too if we're still within the blast radius."

For a second he baulked. He wanted to tell them to go to hell. The only way to save Daniel from what was awaiting him on Heru'ur's world lay through the Stargate. Running in the opposite direction made no sense whatsoever. But then he looked around at those lives he was responsible for: Kawalsky would never let him go alone, neither would Carter, and Martouf probably wouldn't leave her. "Damnit to hell…" He snatched up another staff weapon, threw it to Robertson and then nodded to the Tok'ra. "Lead the way, Marty. Get us out of here."

As O'Neill ran past the place where the Goa'uld hung semi-embedded in the wall, their gaze met. Apophis' eyes glowed briefly gold, but it was a last flicker, and the smile from his bloodstained lips told O'Neill that for once this self-proclaimed god welcomed death; knowing that this time when he took that plunge into oblivion, he would be carrying his enemies with him.

***

O'Neill looked around the planet again and wondered why he was so twitchy. The MALP hadn't shown anything suspicious. Carter's doohickeys weren't picking up anything suspicious…and yet he _was_ suspicious. Something just felt 'off' to him. Or perhaps everything just felt off to him at the moment and he was now taking his problems through the 'gate with him.

He looked around at his team again. A hundred yards to his left, Carter was trying to fix the MALP which was showing a marked reluctance to want to steer. It only had to trundle ten feet up the stairs but it was insisting it wanted to go in circles. If they didn't get it sent back soon, Hammond was going to send a rescue party through, which could be a little embarrassing. Carter was pulling off a panel and fiddling around with the workings now. Teal'c was nodding gravely. Hard to know if he was as interested as he appeared in what she was saying or was just faking it better than O'Neill could manage it. 

Straight ahead of him and stretching off to the right was a big ruined temple place. Having stuck his head round the door to make sure the building was empty he'd left Daniel to run around in there and play by himself while he kept an eye on Carter and Teal'c. Standing just by the gate like that they were vulnerable to anyone else coming through and might need some covering fire in an emergency so he wanted to stay where he could watch them as well as Daniel. He caught occasional glimpses of Daniel as the guy scrambled about over ruined pillars and waved his video camera at things. Even though he wasn't calling out to O'Neill asking him to come and look at things every five minutes the way he'd used to, he was clearly happy enough. Carter was a little irritable because the stupid MALP wasn't doing what it was supposed to but she wasn't really worried. Teal'c was calm and composed. O'Neill was obviously the only one who felt pissed off and uneasy.

He checked his P-90 again and then hoisted his pack more comfortably onto his back. He'd had another bad dream about Daniel the night before. His third in a week. He didn't need a shrink to tell him what this was about: Daniel had been kidnapped right in front of him by someone who had later attempted to rape him, and who had been revealed to be a mass murderer. Added to that Daniel had gone dimension-hopping unsupervised behind O'Neill's back and with the connivance of the rest of his team. While dimension-hopping he had done…stuff with a man which O'Neill didn't approve of. Not because of the act, but because it was…Daniel. He didn't want Daniel doing stuff like that with anyone but…

_Anyone but him?  
_  
O'Neill glowered at that voice in his head. Yeah, right, go for the cheap, obvious Freudian interpretation of his hostility towards the other O'Neill and his feelings of jealousy, shock, anger, betrayal et cetera when he'd seen Daniel and that bastard O'Neill doin' it. Of course that had to be because he didn't want Daniel sleeping with any man except him, didn't it? It couldn't be because Daniel was his _friend_ , damnit, and he didn't want any harm to come to him. The point was, that Xerox O'Neill hadn't kept him safe. He'd let himself get killed right in front of Daniel – very traumatic for Daniel to have to go through that. He'd been selfishly dead when Daniel was about to be raped by Teal'c and really needed some help. Then he'd taken advantage of _this_ O'Neill's relationship with Daniel to seduce him. And then he'd dumped him. Causing Daniel more emotional harm when he really didn't need it. The son-of-a-bitch. Under those circumstances, was it really so surprising that O'Neill didn't like his alternate universe self and thought that even if the guy was in a different dimension it still wasn't far enough away from Daniel?

Of course none of that explained why, ever since he'd seen Daniel and the other O'Neill fucking sweatily in that motel room, he'd been having dreams in which he did things to Daniel that were a long way from platonic. Every time it happened he would wake, flushed, aroused, aching, then be forced to jerk-off desperately as the images in his head receded, the imaginary mouth slipping from his groin, the body heat chilling to a memory he couldn't recapture. It made him feel grubby, humiliated, and hostile. Angry with Daniel for visiting him in his dreams that way; ashamed of the way he'd just used mental images of a naked teammate to get himself off. He was finding it easiest now to blame his counterpart for all of it. He had never had dreams like that about Daniel until that sonofabitch had stuck his oar in. The guy was trying to fuck up a beautiful friendship and he was managing to do it even from the wrong side of the looking glass.

He took off his cap, ran his hand through his hair, and then did another quick check: Daniel was out of sight for the moment but was presumably not in any trouble as he wasn't yelling for help, and Carter and Teal'c were still clearly visible and definitely in one piece. Still, he felt he was entitled to be paranoid: Every time he took his eye off his team or let them go and do something by themselves something got screwed up and they were kidnapped or tortured or both. Next time he saw the Asgard he was going to ask for some kind of tracking device he could inject under the skin of the three of them so he'd know where they were at all times. Preferably something that recorded their biorhythms or whatever so he knew what kind of condition they were in too. He'd asked the Tollan already but they'd turned him down flat. Narim had given him a very old-fashioned look and started talking about Daniel needing his own privacy probably more now than ever since that business with the other O'Neill. He'd resented the implication and got snappish. He should probably have done for real what he'd just pretended to do in the past and swiped one of their medical data devices, but Narim's words had put him off. Did he think it had more to do with spying on Daniel to find out who he was sleeping with than with keeping him safe? If so, Narim was wrong. It didn't. Even before the business with the other O'Neill, he'd sort of broached the subject to Janet Fraiser but she'd given him a very straight look and started talking about personal privacy and what if one of them was on a date?

He'd looked at her in annoyance. "We're talking Carter, Teal'c, and Daniel here, Doc. None of them have the first idea about having a life. The last time any one of them went on a date Nixon was probably President."

She'd still said no, though. He was definitely going to ask the Asgard if they had something. It wouldn't be a weapon after all so he didn't see any reason why they couldn't help him keep his people safe.

Talking of which…

O'Neill spoke quietly into his radio, "Daniel, you there?"

"I'm here, Jack." The voice crackled back quickly enough.

"Where exactly?" O'Neill peered through his field glasses. "I can't see you."

"I'm in a room with what looks like Mesopotamian paintings on the walls but there's some other writing in a language I don't recognize at all. It doesn't look like any kind of earth script and it's attached to the base of each mural."

O'Neill automatically began to walk towards the temple. "Do you mean like the way we might label something in a museum?"

"Yes." Daniel sounded surprised. "That's exactly what it looks like to me."

"Okay, then clear out of there."

"Why?"

O'Neill clenched his jaw in annoyance. Just once it would be nice if when he gave Daniel an order the guy said 'yes' instead of 'why?'. Some days Daniel was like the world's oldest six year-old. "How about 'because I say so'?"

Daniel sighed at him impatiently, the exhalation crackling against O'Neill's ear. "Jack…?"

"Because the level of technology of the people who designated that place a museum might be a lot higher than ours. We have alarms on our museum exhibits, remember?"

"Oh."

He was an expert on Daniel's 'oh's and this one made him increase his pace considerably. "What did you just do?" he demanded quietly.

"I think I may have tripped an…alarm."

"Get out of there! _Now!_ "

He yelled it with such savagery that he saw Carter and Teal'c both turn around to look at him in surprise. 

"Sir?"

"O'Neill?"

"Stand by," he spoke to them rapidly. "We may have to get out of here in a hurry."

"Jack, I really think you're over-reacting." Daniel sounded breathless from where he was clearly having to scramble over things.

"Humor me." O'Neill raked the ruins through his field glasses but couldn't see any sign of Daniel. He wasn't in the first building, at least not in the chamber where O'Neill had first seen him. Why the hell hadn't he gone with him? 

_Because you don't like being alone with Daniel any more. It makes you feel too awkward. If you were alone with him you might have to talk about what happened, and you can't deal with it._

__Oh screw that voice in his head!

He ran through the doorway and peered around the chamber. No sign of anyone. He snapped into the radio, "Damnit, Daniel, where are you? Where exactly in this damned temple are you?"

"I'm not sure. I may have walked a little way. There were about seven or eight chambers. Maybe nine…"

O'Neill stuck his head around the door of the next one. The chamber was huge. The size of a cathedral. Daniel could be half a mile away. "Oh for crying out loud!" He ran back out into the sunny grassland. "Just get out of the building. Get out of it now. I want to see you outside. Daniel…!"

"I'm coming!" Daniel sounded breathless and irritable. "There are lots of broken pillars. I'm having to climb over them. Go and yell at someone else for five minutes and I'll be with you."

O'Neill groaned and switched on his radio again. "Carter?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Forget the damned MALP and stand by. Daniel may have tripped something." He looked up at her as he spoke and she gave him a wave of the hand then pointed at her ear. When he tried his radio again it was dead. "Fuck!" He turned to see if Daniel was in sight yet and saw people coming. Not ancient Mesopotamians unless he was very misinformed. People in uniforms with energy weapons. People no more than three hundred yards away and coming up fast.

"Dial it up!" he yelled hoarsely at Carter.

He spun back round just as Daniel scrambled out of what looked like a broken archway and jumped down onto the grass. O'Neill's heart sank as he saw Daniel was about two hundred yards away. He waved to O'Neill who jabbed a finger urgently in the direction behind him. "Look out!"

It was like watching a movie being shot in slow-mo. He saw everything with terrible clarity. Saw Daniel blink at him in confusion, follow his pointing finger, turn and look at the grim-faced soldiers advancing at a run, then stumble backwards before collecting himself and starting to run.

"Sir!" 

He didn't waste time looking over his shoulder. "Keep dialing, Carter! Teal'c, watch her back." Mentally he was completely focused on that figure made small as a child's toy by distance, the one running towards him, burdened by a pack it hadn't occurred to him to throw down, and with hordes of soldiers closing fast on his heels. _Come on, Daniel. Run! Run like hell because I am_ not _going to watch you die again._

__O'Neill peered through the field glasses, torn between what to do. A really fast sprinter could do a hundred yards in ten seconds. Daniel wasn't a really fast sprinter and he had twice that distance to cover. The good news was that there was enough time for the gate to engage by the time Daniel reached it. The bad news was that Daniel was never going to reach it.

Not knowing what else to do, O'Neill started to run towards him.

 

Daniel felt the first shot slam into him as he reached the main entrance to the temple. He'd mentally designated that the halfway mark so he felt a flash of relief as he drew level with it, which was immediately banished as something knocked his legs out from underneath him. The pain hit a second later and he clasped at his thigh then snatched his hand away quickly as he burnt his fingers on his still smoldering flesh and pants.

"Oh God…" Nausea followed as he saw the smoking wound, black and red with blood and charred skin. 

"Daniel! Get up and keep moving! Daniel!"

The hoarse shout galvanized him into action and he staggered to his feet. As he put his right foot to the ground, pain screamed up his nerve endings to explode in his thigh, but he kept moving. It felt as though he was struggling through quicksand but he forced his legs to run.

He had reached the next temple chamber when the second shot hit him. It daggered through his pack to bounce off his left hip, spinning him around a hundred and eighty degrees to face the enemy. Which was when the third shot hit him in the left shoulder with a force that lifted his feet off the ground and sent him crashing to the dirt. This time he knew there was no point in getting up because there was no way in hell he could run another step. He was dead so he might as well get the benefit of being able to lie down.

"Daniel!"

That anguished yell had him rolling over but he still knew it was pointless. Everything hurt too much, he was bleeding like a stuck pig, the bad guys were coming in much too fast for him to outrun them.

"Daniel! Get up! Get _up_!"

Then he blinked and saw Jack running _towards_ him. What the hell? Jack was firing off round after round of P-90 fire but he needed a tank to protect himself from the kind of weaponry these guys were carrying. He was going to get himself killed. Damnit! 

Daniel found he was up and running. The pain was so bad it sucked all the color out of the world; turned everything granular and monochrome. There was a burning cavern where his chest should be, a pool of molten lava where his left shoulder should be, but he was moving forward. So was Jack. Straight towards him, straight into the teeth of all those guns.

"Damnit, Jack, you're going the wrong way!" Daniel shouted it at him as he tripped and hit the dirt again. A blast of heat went over his head. He just wanted to lie down and never have to get up. He could die here as well as in the infirmary and it would involve no more running. A cry of pain from Jack jerked his head up and got him back on his feet again.

Jack was snarling as he sprayed fire around with ruthless efficiency but his left arm was smoking. Staff weapon blasts whooshed over Daniel's head to elicit cries of pain from the enemy behind him. Christ, now Teal'c and Sam were running the wrong way as well! 

Daniel forced himself to keep going, but this time when another blast hit him and he went down, he knew nothing and no one was going to be able to get him onto his feet. Pain sang at him from every nerve and all he wanted to do was curl up in a ball and black out.

"Daniel…"

Strong hands were pulling him up, an arm going around his waist while his arm was looped around Jack's neck. A body touched his, a hard hip beside his hip, the smell of Jack's sweat and Jack's aftershave something he gulped at gratefully as it temporarily blotted out the stench of his own blood.

"I can't…" Daniel said it desperately; the thought of having to run a hideous impossibility. "Jack, I can't, please just leave me…"

"Not a chance in hell." Jack wheeled them both around, sprayed more fire across the people behind them, then turned and started running, taking Daniel with him.

Daniel ran. He had no choice in the matter. This was like Ernest's world all over again. He couldn't elect not to escape without condemning Jack to death as well.

The next fifty yards were an agonizing blur. His feet kept hitting the ground. He knew that because every time it happened, pain shot up through his legs and thrummed right through his body. He could smell the overpowering stench of his blood, burning flesh, his sweat, Jack's sweat. Teal'c was still firing. So was Sam. Jack was concentrating on trying to get them both to that glowing pool of blue. Daniel was just trying to make himself do what he knew he couldn't: keep running, keep breathing, to stay alive just long enough for Jack to make it home in one piece.

"Go!" Jack yelled it at them. "Carter! Teal'c! Go now! We're right behind you!"

Daniel watched them hesitate then disappear into the event horizon, energy blasts following them. God, he hoped they ducked on the other side. Then he was tripping over stairs, Jack was hauling him up, they were past the DHD, they were into the Stargate. Finally, he could black out. 

 

O'Neill awoke with a groan. Christ, everything hurt a lot. He felt as if he'd been ten rounds with Teal'c without an Ataneik armband. Janet Fraiser was obviously rationing the morphine for flesh wounds just because Daniel…

"Daniel!" O'Neill rolled over in an instant, sitting up and looking around. A warm breeze wafted through his hair and he automatically brushed the sand from his face while his tongue tasted salt on his cracked lips.

He blinked in surprise. _What is wrong with this picture?_ He had a vivid memory of the false image Urgo's creator had used to lure travelers through the gate. Except this seemed to be both three-dimensional and real. Tropical island paradise. Very nice. Very Aloha from Maui. Very nothing whatsoever like the 'gateroom or the infirmary he ought to be in right now.

"What the hell…?" O'Neill twisted around to take in a three hundred and sixty degree survey: blue-green sea; rolling sandy beaches fifty feet wide and the color of spun gold; Stargate thirty feet away still fizzing like an electrical outlet that had just suffered an overload; coconut palms lining the beach with lush jungle beyond them; Daniel…

"Oh Christ…" O'Neill was on his feet and running before he'd even thought about it but as he got closer he could see that things were bad.

Daniel was lying face down in the sand, very still, almost as though he was – 

"No!" O'Neill turned him over carefully and listened to his chest. No heartbeat. Not breathing. Technically that made him…Dead. Oh Christ, no, not dead, not Daniel, not ever. 

"Don't you dare be dead, Daniel! Not after everything we've been through, you ungrateful little son-of-a-bitch." 

He karate chopped down hard on Daniel's breastbone to try to get his heart beating again, then started compression. Ten hard quick presses of the heel of his hand onto Daniel's chest, then leaning across to pinch Daniel's nose closed and breathe twice into his mouth. He wasn't even sure if he was doing this right. It had been a while. He just remembered you never gave up. Not ever. One hour. Two hours. You kept doing it. "Breathe, damnit, breathe!" He snarled it in between rhythmic jolts on Daniel's chest. The fear was terrible. He couldn't be alone here with Daniel's corpse. Daniel couldn't be dead. Not as long as Jack O'Neill was alive because he damned well wasn't going to let him be. 

"Breathe!" He yelled it so loudly, a brilliantly-colored bird squawked into the air and flew off with its gaudy tail-feathers streaming. Sweat was pouring from every pore; trickling down his back, running into his eyes. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten. Breathe. Not too hard. Keep it gentle. His mouth pressed against Daniel's mouth. His lips were so soft. All these years they'd known one another and he'd never known that. Oh God, this was the closest they were ever going to come to a kiss. Breathe again. Make his chest rise and fall, teach it the rhythm it had to remember. More compression. Keep doing it. Bring him back. "Don't make me come in there, Daniel…" He panted it in between those rapid pushes against his sternum. _Don't leave me here alone without you. Don't leave me…_

__"Damnit, Daniel. You'd better start breathing right now or I swear to God I'll kill you myself." Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he leaned across to pinch Daniel's nose again, and then saw it: his chest rise and fall by itself.

Fingers shaking he fumbled for a pulse. Yes, there it was, a tiny beat against his fingertips. He put his face close to Daniel's and felt warm breath gust against his lips. The relief made Daniel's face unexpectedly blurry. He breathed in greedily, snatching a telltale exhalation into his lungs, having to blink hard to bring Daniel's face back into focus. When a salt drop fell on Daniel's cheek he reached out and brushed it away gently with this thumb. 

Closing his eyes, O'Neill sat back and ran a still shaking hand through his hair. His own heart was still thudding against his ribs with exertion, but now Daniel's was beating again. Daniel's chest was a mess of seared and blood-sodden cloth but O'Neill could hear that welcome percussion for himself. Faint but definitely there. 

Sitting back on his heels, O'Neill offered up a prayer of thanks to a god he didn't even believe in. Daniel was alive. They were stranded and maybe they'd never get home but he wasn't alone and Daniel wasn't dead. He turned to look back at the unconscious man, and then for the first time took in his overall condition. The smile faded from his face as he realized that the fact Daniel was still breathing in and out might be the only good news there was.

 

Grunting with exertion, O'Neill grasped Daniel under the arms and dragged him gently away from the high tide line, Daniel's heels furrowing a double line in the sand like a particularly poor piece of plowing. He avoided the palm trees despite the friendly shade they were offering, not wanting Daniel's skull fractured by a falling coconut, settling for propping up his pack so it cast some shade on Daniel's forehead. He'd been hoping Daniel might be stirring by now, groaning, blinking, asking what bus had hit him, but Daniel just lay there limp and defenseless as a discarded doll, skin pale as porcelain. He'd never realized how uneven Daniel's bangs were; a ragged line that was probably the height of geek chic but which looked like a kid's haircut; something done in a hurry on a child wriggling about uncomfortably because he was going to be late for school… It made his guts twist with an unexpected spasm of protectiveness. 

O'Neill crouched down next to him and looked at Daniel's burnt, blood-soaked uniform. As he reached for the medical kit, for the scissors to start cutting smoking cloth away from seared skin, he told himself that he could do this. He could deal with this, fix this, make Daniel better again. Despite the blood loss, the pallor, the shock, the smoldering and bleeding wounds, Daniel wasn't going to die on him. Not again. Never again….

***

Daniel wrapped his arms around himself, realizing Teal'c hadn't been kidding when he said it got cold on this planet at night.

The Jaffa had deliberated for a long time about where to make camp. Daniel had wanted them to take shelter in the nearby forest, where it was bound to be warmer, but after some thought, Teal'c had picked a place in a deep hollow, about a hundred yards from the trees. Having built a fire he'd told Daniel to sit between it and the highest overhang of the bank. Daniel was huddled as close to the campfire as he could get, but his back was still cold. The bank behind him was apparently supposed to be reflecting the fire's heat back and keeping him warm on both sides, but apparently no one had explained that to the bank because Daniel was _freezing_.

He looked across at the Jaffa reproachfully. "If you'd let me bring my pack I would have had a space blanket."

Teal'c was standing on the other side of the campfire, staff weapon at the ready as he listened intently. "And had you walked faster and talked less we would be within the citadel of Heru'ur by now."

"I don't _want_ to be within the citadel of Heru'ur. I want to be where Colonel O'Neill is." As the words left his mouth, Daniel realized he'd spoken more truly than he knew. He didn't have a place in mind he called 'home' any more: just a person. It really had become as simple as that: Daniel Jackson wanted to be wherever Colonel O'Neill was, and as long as he was with him he was home.

Looking up to see if the Jaffa had noticed his moment of revelation, he saw that Teal'c's attention was directed elsewhere. He was still listening, turning his head from side to side like an animal scenting the air.

"Are we expecting visitors?" He didn't usually take refuge in sarcasm, but he thought six foot four Jaffa with muscles on top of muscles, who dragged him around by the back of his jacket and treated him like a troublesome child, deserved it.

"The creatures who live on this planet traditionally hunt at night."

"Creatures?" Daniel reached into his vest pockets, trying to find something to eat. "Are they people or animals?"

"They are animals of great speed and strength."

Daniel's fingers closed on two breath mints which bore an uncanny resemblance to Chicklits. He tossed those and hunted around for something more nourishing. Although the crackers looked like yellow corrugated cardboard, he thought that if he smothered them in some of the accompanying jam they would be a lot better than nothing. The rumbling in his stomach also told him not to be too fussy. As he made to rip open the packet, the crackers were promptly snatched from his grasp.

"No food."

He stared up at the Jaffa open-mouthed. "What?"

"The scent of it will attract the miew-bin-khepet."

"I'm hungry," Daniel protested. 

"Once we reach the safety of the citadel you may eat."

"But I'm hungry _now_ , and they're not going to feed me in the citadel, they're going to kill me, and what did you call them? 'Miew-bin-khepet'?" Daniel tried to ignore the clamor from his growling stomach to concentrate on the translation. "Cat? Bad? Death? That doesn't sound good."

"The miew'bin are not good," the Jaffa assured him gravely. "They are in fact very bad. But they will feed you in the Citadel." There was an odd pause before he said, "If you are co-operative, Heru'ur may treat you well."

Daniel gave him a look of annoyance. "I'm not telling Heru'ur anything. Just because I'm not a soldier doesn't mean I'm going to roll over and give the Goa'uld all the information they want about Earth."

"He may not require you to…tell him anything."

Daniel couldn't understand the expression on the Jaffa's face. Teal'c looked the way those people at social services had looked before they'd told him his grandfather wasn't going to be coming for him after all. That was the expression people always got around him when they had bad news and weren't sure how to break it to him. But seeing as how he already knew that Heru'ur was going to torture him before he killed him, he really couldn't see what other bad news Teal'c could be keeping from him. That seemed to him to be pretty much as bad as life got. Unless in Jaffa culture there was less importance placed on the living body than the soul in the afterlife, and he wasn't going to get a decent burial.

"Is this something to do with my funeral? Because I really don't care what happens to me after I'm dead. I'd just rather not be dead, if it's all the same to you. Talking of which, if we turned around now, we could probably make it back to the Stargate by daybreak."

Teal'c regarded him levelly. "You told me you were too tired to walk any further today."

Daniel moistened his lips. "Well, I might have more energy if we were going in the right direction." He held out a hand. "Can I have my crackers now?"

"No, you can not."

Daniel glared at him. "You have a moral obligation to give me food and water."

The Jaffa's expression betrayed not a hint of impatience. "I have no moral obligations towards you, you are my enemy. But as first prime of Apophis on a mission to deliver you to Lord Heru'ur, I have a duty to prevent you from being eaten by wild animals. This I will endeavor to do."

"I don't see any wild animals, and I'm _hungry_." Daniel gave the Jaffa a reproachful look, waited until he'd walked to the far side of the camp, then began to hunt around in his vest pocket for something else to eat. When his fingers closed on the square outline of something that felt like chocolate he tried to look casual, hiding it behind his hand as he slipped it out of his pocket. When he risked a quick glance at the wrapping he felt his heart turn over. Purple paper. The color of emperor's togas and Cadbury's milk chocolate. Definitely not Air Force issue, but he'd told Colonel O'Neill it was his favorite. The Colonel must have remembered and asked the people preparing their vests to put it in for Daniel. 

But the Colonel was never going to be able to do that again, because the Colonel was dead. He was dead and cold with his eyes staring sightlessly at nothing, and he was never ever going to put his hand on Daniel's shoulder ever again.

He'd been dodging that truth all day, but it hit him like a punch to the solar plexus now, knocking the air from him, stinging his eyes, turning the fire to a blur of red and gold. He gripped the chocolate bar tighter, angrily wiping his eyes as he did so. 

Daniel could feel a terrible hollow inside himself that was never going to be filled. There had been so many missing pieces in his life; so many missing people; spaces which he'd had to plug with knowledge instead; languages; cultures; lost civilizations. Wonderful knowledge but which couldn't tell him a joke to take his mind off it when he heard yet another bully call him a geek; could never put its arms around him when the nightmares came; could never tell him that it loved him.

"Give that to me."

He looked up to find Teal'c looming over him sternly. He held the chocolate against his chest. "No. It's mine."

"Give it to me."

Daniel gripped it tighter, glaring at the Jaffa with something approaching hatred. "No!"

Teal'c was gazing at him with bafflement in his brown eyes. "Do not be difficult."

In one part of his mind, he knew that having a Mexican standoff over a bar of chocolate was completely absurd. He also knew that alienating Teal'c was a bad idea, but it felt like all he had left of the Colonel and he was damned if he was going to give it up. "You can't have it, it's mine."

He saw something flicker in the Jaffa's eyes which he didn't understand; a wince as though an old wound had just been probed. Then with one decisive grab and twist, Teal'c wrenched the chocolate from his hands.

"No!"

Daniel leapt to his feet, trying to snatch it back while the Jaffa automatically raised it over his head where Daniel couldn't reach it. He was having flashbacks to junior high, his books held hostage by jocks with attitude and more inches than him. _Jump for it, Jackson. Come on, you'll make the basketball team yet…_

"Give it back! It's mine! The Colonel gave it to me! Give it back!"  
 _  
_"Daniel!"

He stopped jumping to stare at the Jaffa open-mouthed. He hadn't even known that Teal'c had remembered his name. 

The Jaffa went on quietly. "You may have it back in the morning. But it is more difficult for the miew'bin to scent food through the armor of a serpent guard than through your clothing."

He said breathlessly, "Colonel O'Neill gave it to me."

Teal'c definitely winced that time. "I understand."

"No, you don't. You don't understand or we wouldn't be here, we'd be back there helping him. But now he's dead, isn't he? He's dead because you wouldn't let me help him."

Teal'c looked at him for a moment and then sighed. "Crying will solve nothing."

With a sense of shock, Daniel realized that his face was wet and wiped it hurriedly, turning away in embarrassment. "I love him," he whispered. Even as the words left his mouth, he wondered if the confession came as more of a surprise to him than it was to Apophis's enigmatic First Prime. But it was true, he was in love with a man, worse, he was probably in love with a dead man. In either case there was equally little possibility of his feelings ever being returned. When a log on the fire snapped and sparked, he wondered if it had just masked the sound of his heart actually breaking. Nothing else could explain the gaping pain in his chest, now burning like a staff weapon blast.

After a long breathless silence, Teal'c said gently, "Try to get some sleep. I will keep watch for the miew'bin." 

Too miserable even to argue any more, or to point out that he didn't care if the miew'bin ate him or not as he was going to be killed when they reached the Citadel anyway, Daniel curled up between the bank and the fire and closed his eyes. He knew sleep wouldn't come, although nightmares might, and in either case there would be thoughts of the Colonel, dead and cold upon the stone floor of that huge chamber, the pool of blood spreading out from him, a silent draining of irreplaceable warmth.

***

O'Neill couldn't help thinking how much easier life would have been if they'd all been diverted to the same Stargate address. He could have asked Carter to build the fire in which he needed to heat the seawater in which to sterilize his equipment in between stitching each wound. She could have handed him things. Come to think of it she could have done the damned stitching, she was probably better at using a needle and thread than he was. Come to that _Teal'c_ was probably better at using a needle and thread than he was.

He groaned and tried to crick his neck back into place. How long had he been doing this now? Too long, definitely. He kept worrying that he'd missed something obvious. His medical knowledge was a little rusty because Carter or Daniel usually did the first aid in the field. It was there, of course, dinned into him along with a whole lot of other useful information the US Air Force had seen fit to drip-feed into his consciousness over the years, but he was having to reach for it, like an old telephone number from a previous address. 

He sat back on his heels and looked over his handiwork. So far, so reasonably okay. He'd dealt with that nasty burn to the right thigh, very near to that deep gash Daniel had sustained when trying to escape from Hathor; nasty but not life-threatening as long as it didn't become infected. As it had still been smoking, he'd poured several pints of sea-water over it in the hope that it would do some good. Then he'd cut away all the pants leg from around it, used tweezers to extricate any clothing melted into the wound by the heat of the blast, and then left it alone to dry while he saw to the other injuries. The one on Daniel's right shoulder, like the one of his left hip, were comparatively minor, clean gashes that had bled profusely enough to wash out the wound but not so extensively that there was any suggestion of arterial injury. It had been relatively easy to cut away the clothing from around them, clean them out, then stitch them up. It was the shoulder injury that was scaring the shit out of him. Daniel had taken a blast from some weapon O'Neill had never seen before. The wound was deep and messy and there was no exit hole; meaning whatever had made it was still in there.

Now as he dug around in Daniel's shoulder with a pair of tweezers for a nasty alien projectile, O'Neill was very glad that Daniel was unconscious.

It took him ten minutes of probing about to find the damned thing and he was getting very close to panicking that all he was doing was causing more tissue damage to what was already a frighteningly serious wound. The blood kept obscuring everything and he had to keep using precious gauze to soak up the blood so he could see what he was looking for. But finally he glimpsed something metallic amidst the blood and managed to carefully coax the evil little object out. He dropped it straight onto a piece of gauze to take a look at it, and then, as he realized how unusual it was, fetched a proper sample container to put it in.

The object looked like a very small bomb. It was round but with spikes projecting out from it. Even more sinister, each spike oozed an unpleasant looking green liquid. 

"Fuck." O'Neill reached for the antiseptic and started pouring it into Daniel's shoulder wound. He knew how to do this; it just wasn't instinctive with him now the way it had been in the past; but he did remember all the stuff about cutting away clothing, clean the vicinity, irrigate the wound, clean from the center outwards, never inside in. So, he knew he was doing this right; he just couldn't quite convince himself it was going to be enough. Every time he caught a glimpse of that nasty little mini-bomb that had been spitting green goop into Daniel's body, he got that sinking feeling in his stomach again. The people who had blasted the hell out of them without asking any questions had been just the type to come up with really unpleasant weaponry. These were probably the kind of guys who'd thought of the alien equivalent of dum-dum bullets and napalm, and whatever that green stuff did, O'Neill somehow doubted it was a disinfectant. No, it had to be a poison but was it a biological or chemical agent? 

After some deliberation, he decided not to give any morphine. It slowed the heart rate and after what Daniel had just been through that was the last thing he needed. Anyway, as Daniel was unconscious he wasn't in pain, and they might need it later. But he gave an antibiotic shot straight away. He suspected penicillin might not be enough to combat what could well be poison but it wouldn't do any harm and it might do some good, and it would at least combat the germs that had been carried into the wound from Daniel's skin. 

He was deliberately not thinking about rescue. He might be an eternal optimist but there were limits and being sent to another planet through a Stargate the SGC probably couldn't trace, and which had clearly blown about six fuses with the overload anyway seemed to him to be a pretty clear indicator they weren't going to be found any time soon. Which meant there wasn't going to be any Carter to turn up and think of some brilliant scheme to get the Stargate up and running again, and definitely no Doc Fraiser to turn up and save Daniel with some magical injection. All Daniel had was him: a guy who didn't know the first thing about getting the 'gate working and whose medical knowledge had always been basic and was now shrouded by some fairly thick cobwebs. So he was going to have to be enough. If a rusty Air Force Colonel with failing knees was all that lay between Daniel and death, then a rusty Air Force Colonel with failing knees was going to have to be all Daniel needed to survive.

Talking of which…O'Neill looked at his own shoulder and realized he needed to get it cleaned out and bandaged, because the last thing either of them could afford was for him to get an infected wound. 

As he slapped antiseptic and a dressing onto his stinging shoulder, O'Neill looked around at their surroundings. What did they have? What did they need? They had an entire ocean full of antiseptic in the shape of salt water. They needed fresh water to drink and fuel to make a fire, so he was going to have to go and look for both of those. Then there was food, but there were coconut palms; he could see plenty of pools which were probably full of all kinds of crustaceans, there was what looked like a lagoon very nearby, and then there was a whole jungle which should be filled with fruit, as well as birds and monkeys. But before he did anything else he was going to have to build a shelter. Looking up at the sun overhead he estimated he had about six hours of daylight left. First things first. He needed to ensure that Daniel had shade to shelter him from the heat, and something to keep him warm at night, so he might as well get on with it straight away. A temporary shelter would do for now. He could just jam some bamboo into the ground and weave some leaves through it to keep the sun off but as soon as he'd done that he needed to build something pretty permanent because Daniel wasn't going to be moving any time soon. 

As he looked back at Daniel before setting off to gather some bamboo, O'Neill thought that Daniel wasn't going to be doing anything anytime soon. The way Daniel looked right now, breathing in and out was pretty much all he could hope for.

***

Samantha Carter sat up in bed and winced as the pain thrummed through her broken arm and lanced through her head. She wondered if you could use a healing device on yourself because round about now she was so desperate to join the search for Daniel and the Colonel she was willing to give it a try. As General Hammond came into focus, she said, "Anything?"

He shook his head. "Not yet, Major."

"Sir, I need to be out there. I need to be looking for them."

Janet Fraiser's voice was soothing and compassionate. "What you need is to be in bed. Concussion isn't something you can just shrug off."

"Everything that can be done is being done," the general assured her, looking at her with that familiar mixture of sympathy, anxiety and firmness which was so characteristic of him.

She put a hand up to her head, feeling close to tears. "They were right behind us. Ten feet at the most. I knew we should have waited. Daniel was hurt, the Colonel had been hit. We should have seen them through, but the Colonel told us to go and – "

"Sam," Janet squeezed her shoulder gently. "Colonel O'Neill gave an order. You followed it. You and Teal'c have nothing to reproach yourselves for."

The tears insisted on squeezing out through her eyelids and she had to blink them away angrily. She wiped her eyes. "Is anyone correlating the data? Anyone trying to work out if the stream could have split again? They were firing energy weapons at us and there were several hits onto the 'gate itself…"

General Hammond's tone was soothing but firm. "The wormhole data is being analyzed now, Major. As soon as you're well enough to look at it, you can go over it. But either the stream split and they were sent to a different Stargate address – in which case we can hope they're safe. Or else they were killed by the hostiles on P3X-419 and there is nothing you or anyone else can do for them. But if that were the case I would have expected the MALP we sent through to show us some remains before it was destroyed. Either way, the best help you can give Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson right now is to rest and get better."

Carter closed her eyes as the room performed another dizzying pirouette, pain slicing through her brain like the heated blade of a sword. She kept seeing Daniel's face as he ran towards the 'gate, those familiar features drained of all color, shock in his eyes because he was dying. _Oh God, Daniel…_ She found her voice with difficulty: "Is Teal'c…?"

"He's still out there searching."

"And you've contacted Moscow to make sure they weren't sent through the Russian gate…?"

"Yes, Major. Six hours ago." General Hammond rested a hand on her shoulder. "Anything that can be done will be done, I promise you that. Now get some sleep. The sooner you're well again, the sooner you can help search for Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson."

She remembered her own agonized glance going to the Colonel, seeking reassurance that Daniel was wrong, that he wasn't dead yet. There had been blazing determination in those brown eyes; a man so rooted in denial he was going to make the whole universe come and join him there if he had to. Everything about the man had said Daniel wasn't dying, no way, and no how. While there was one breath left in Jack O'Neill's body, Daniel was going to live. 

As Carter drifted back into the restless slumber of the concussed, she took a tiny spark of comfort from that. Whatever they did or failed to do there was nothing the Colonel wouldn't do to keep himself and Daniel alive until they found them. All they had to do was find them…

***

Had he lived, Ry'ac would have been approaching adulthood by now. Teal'c tossed another stick onto the fire, watching the sparks it produced sending tiny spits of light into the darkness; red and gold; blood and bondage. No one who had not lived through it could know how it felt to lose a child. Sometimes he would get flashes of too many memories, the wet baby Drey'ac had put into his arms, the stubborn toddler constantly frustrated by his parents inability to comprehend his needs; the boy fascinated by tales of battle and heroism, the terrible lightness of that corpse in his arms. All Ry'ac had ever wanted was to make his father proud of him, and Teal'c knew how that felt. He had been denied that possibility by Cronos. His father had never lived to see him make first prime of Apophis; his father had never lived to see anything again after the Goa'uld he had served so faithfully had killed the symbiote inside him with savage relish so that its blood would intermingle with and poison his bloodstream. An agonizing death, Teal'c knew that; had asked the symbiote inside him for information and had received it, a poisoned gift given with malevolent satisfaction. At least Ry'ac's death had been quick. He had been so shocked by the realization that his great adventure was not going to end in triumph as it always did in the stories told to him at bedtime that he had barely seemed to notice the pain. He had gazed up at Teal'c in astonishment and murmured, "Father, I am shot…" Then the blood had welled from his mouth and he had died. 

At the time Teal'c had felt a part of himself die as well, and he had thought it was his humanity. There was nothing left after this. He had not the strength or the will to offer any support to Drey'ac, too consumed by his own mourning, his own rage at himself. He was the one who had done this to his son. In trying to give him a sense of his own pride and dignity, trying to help him to grow up to be noble, courageous and heroic, to know of the wrong done to his grandfather which in time would be avenged, he had sent his son to his death.

Ry'ac had overheard Teal'c telling Drey'ac that Cronos was sending a battle force against them on Chulak; that Apophis was adamant that his forces could be defeated but Teal'c was not so sure. She had believed absolutely in Apophis's divinity and Teal'c's near blasphemy had sometimes frightened her, but on this occasion she had listened to her husband, not her god, and promised that if Teal'c wanted it she would do as he advised and take Ry'ac to the Red Hills, to her mother's family, to the place where unbeknown to her his first love still resided.

He had been thinking of Shau'nac that day; bitter to reflect on it now. He had not noticed at once that his son had taken his father's staff weapon and gone to meet the approaching army of Cronos, determined to claim the murderer's head for himself, because he had been thinking of the woman stolen from him by the priests. A priestess could not marry. A priestess was intended to save her love only for the god she served. He and Shau'nac had loved one another from first sight, a burn of passion that they could neither avoid nor deny. They had succumbed but nothing had been altered by it, except their hearts. She had still been swept into the temple and her devotions to her god, and he had become one of Apophis's Jaffa. He loved his wife but she was not his first love, and although there was passion and devotion and affection between them, he would never entirely forget Shau'nac. The cynical part of him wondered if it was because their love affair had been interrupted that it had never lost its power; there had been no time for boredom to intervene; nothing of the routine of everyday love. All snatched passion in the shadows with the devotional fires burning on an altar overhead; the spice of divinity scenting their kisses; their guilty silhouettes flickering across the painted images of their god. Shau'nac had a great desire to believe in something and she had chosen to believe in Teal'c. She was an idealist while he thought of himself more as a pragmatist. A part of him wanted to deliver his people; another part thought that it was his first duty to avenge those of his own blood. Ry'ac's death had tipped the balance. Cronos must die. All other considerations could wait. His marriage. His life. His knowledge that Apophis was a posturing tyrant no more worthy of the name 'god' than any other alien of superior technology. His desire to help the Jaffa free themselves from a system that enslaved them, to make them realize that without the Jaffa the Goa'uld were nothing; they did not serve gods, they were the duped captives of monsters; monsters who without the assistance of humankind were too weak even to draw breath. All of those considerations could wait until Cronos was dead. He would kill for Apophis so that Apophis would grow strong and in time defeat his rival and in doing so unknowingly avenge Teal'c's father's death.

Perhaps, with Bra'tac's teaching, and Shau'nac's urging, his father's tortured shade would have lost his power to whisper to him of duty; but then he had followed his son's footsteps to the camp of Cronos, seen him, had his mouth open to call to him to come back at once, when the group of Jaffa had appeared over the rise. They had blasted him with a staff weapon with less care than he would have taken in killing a wild beast, then left him for the world to grow cold around him, on a muddy bank. By the time Teal'c had reached his son's side they had been out of sight, and Ry'ac's blood had turned the earth around him redder even than the soil Shau'nac's people had farmed for so many centuries.

Ry'ac had died in Teal'c's arms and nothing had ever hurt so much. He had felt something inside him turn to ice then and known that some part of himself had been lost forever. His compassion, perhaps, his ability to care with any true intensity about the plight of another living thing. His child was lost forever, and what became of the child of other men had mattered to him so much less from that day on. He had carried the corpse back to their home and everything had seemed distant to him except the warmth draining from the body he carried; even the anguished cry of his own wife; a sound that on another day would have cut his heart in two at the depths of her grief. Everything was numb and far away; there was nothing left for him now except vengeance.

Teal'c jerked his head up as he realized he had been drowsing. Kel'no'reem could too often drift into a kind of dream-state if one was not careful, and this was no place to let ones defenses slip. They had told him at the chapaa'ai that the miew'bin had grown in numbers and were short of food; there were packs of them feeding off travelers and would undoubtedly feed off them. He had mistrusted their motives; it was obvious they wanted to be the ones to deliver the Tau'ri to their god in the hope of winning his approval, but the fear in their eyes when they spoke of the hungry cats had seemed genuine. 

He was trying not to let his defenses slip where the young human was concerned as well. His mixture of stubbornness, courage, determination, and vulnerability had got to him in a way no other prisoner ever had. He was too much like the son he had lost; the same way of planting his feet on the ground as if only a blow could move him, those sideways looks to see if the one thwarting him was likely to crumble, the same belief that Teal'c was a good man, that Teal'c could do anything he put his mind to; exasperation and confidence combined. And his grief for O'Neill was moving him also. A part of him was hoping that the wily soldier had somehow evaded death once again. This Tau'ri certainly needed someone to look after him, and if something happened to prevent Teal'c handing him over to Heru'ur O'Neill would clearly be the only person to whom he could safely be returned…

What was he thinking? Nothing was going to prevent him from handing him over to Heru'ur except death. And if Teal'c was dead, Daniel would never survive on a world such as this in any case. If they survived tonight without the miew'bin carrying them off then on the morrow the boy would be given to Heru'ur and Heru'ur would…

He could not stop himself glancing over at the sleeping Tau'ri. His hair had trailed across his forehead and he looked absurdly young in the flickering firelight; huddled against the cold in those oversized clothes. He felt a stab of anger towards O'Neill. What had the man been thinking to bring such a boy on a mission? And then Teal'c remembered that the normal human lifespan was so much shorter than his own that what seemed like a boy to him would have seemed an adult to O'Neill; would be an adult in their culture. A very knowledgeable adult in some ways; he had certainly known more about the relationships of the Goa'uld that any Tau'ri Teal'c had previously encountered; but an innocent in others. The 'love' he had spoken of for O'Neill had clearly come as a revelation to him, and yet it had been obvious to Teal'c as they walked across the chamber together that there was a connection between them that went dangerously deep. And it was evidently a pure love, still untasted and untried. Teal'c knew without any possibility of reprieve that this Daniel was a stranger to the ways of Heru'ur in the bedchamber. So he was delivering a particularly vulnerable yet stubborn virgin up to be brutalized into submission by a Goa'uld notorious for his appetites… He thought of his father; of the way he had died; of Ry'ac in his arms, the lifeblood seeping into Teal'c's clothes; forcing himself to remember that he was on a higher mission here. He could not let himself be moved from his purpose by weakness now.

"Why are you doing this?"

The young human's question so perfectly mirrored his own internal doubts that he could only gape at him. The one called 'Daniel' was sitting up now, shaking his fair hair back from his face and reaching for his glasses. He looked straight at Teal'c without any flicker of apprehension. "You're obviously a good man. So why are you working for Apophis? Why are you taking me to Heru'ur? I haven't done you any harm."

"Be silent."

"Why? Because if I don't you'll kill me?" His smile was a brief but maddeningly sweet thing; inviting Teal'c to join in the joke; to acknowledge the absurdity. "Given the fact that Heru'ur is going to torture me before he kills me, your killing me might seem like a much better option."

Teal'c rose to his feet, taking care to loom over him. "I will not kill you." As the human brightened in relief, he added firmly, "I will, however, beat you."

The look the young man flashed him was all resentment and reproach, still no fear. He seemed to have a difficulty imagining pain he was not actually feeling. He thoroughly disapproved of Teal'c trying to bully him into obedience but he didn't yet actually believe that any brutality to himself was going to result from him failing to show that obedience. With a jolt of self-revelation, Teal'c realized the young man was right; he had no intention of hurting him. Angry with himself for such weakness and with the boy for perceiving it, he strode across to where Daniel was sitting and yanked him unceremoniously to his feet by his hair. "You will be silent!"

"Ow!" Daniel grabbed Teal'c's hands, trying to loosen his fingers, and standing on tiptoe to ease the pain in his scalp. "Why are you doing this? Why are you hurting people who've never done you any harm? Why are you protecting Apophis when Apophis has enslaved your people?"

Teal'c released him abruptly and stepped back. "You will be silent or else I _will_ beat you," he growled as ominously as he could manage.

The young man glared at him. "All that will prove is that you're stronger than I am. It won't make you right, or what you're doing."

Teal'c heard a sound and held up his hand. "Be quiet."

"No, I'm not going to be quiet. You have to listen to me. You have to understand that…"

Teal'c grabbed the boy and clasped a hand over his mouth, whispering urgently in his ear: "Be quiet so I can hear if the miew'bin approach."

"Oh…" Daniel murmured into his hand. As Teal'c released him, the young man gave him a rueful smile. "Sorry."

Before Teal'c could many any reply something full of fur and teeth leapt from the bank and hurled itself at his throat.

***

Another day, another dead Goa'uld, another dead SGC soldier, another Tok'ra teltak. They definitely weren't paying him enough for this shit. He closed his eyes against the persistent slicing pain in his head, feeling the thrum of that stolen Goa'uld machinery shuddering through his fillings. Too much metal everywhere, and not just in his molars. He hated the artificial smell of these things; missed the honest stink of airplane fuel. He'd rather listen to the whirr of helicopter blades than this; would have felt safer in a Black Hawk even if flying one was the nearest thing to impossible he'd ever encountered; a death glider was a cakewalk beside it; no damned foot pedals for a start. Naquadah made everything much too simple; especially the killing of enemies. He hated it when they had to leave a corpse behind. He liked bringing everyone home, even if it was in a bodybag, they still deserved to come home. And they'd had to leave Casey's body back on that place, and Daniel…

Daniel. 

Even when he closed his eyes tighter, the images were there; a mixture of the other Daniel in his bed, wincing a little as he thrust into him with a little more passion than discretion, sweat trickling down his face, glistening on his bare chest, and his Daniel, his trusting wide-eyed wanderer staring up at the muscled athleticism of Heru'ur, wrists manacled to the bed, not getting it even now, why he was here, what was going to happen next. Revelation coming in an agonizing spike of pain as an erect cock was rammed inside him without warning or preparation or lubrication…

"Christ…!" O'Neill put his head in his hands, digging his fingers into his hair. He had been so careless once. Sex had been a game to him. Another seduction, another twenty points for him on life's eternal scoreboard. Pleasure for him and not even emotional alimony for them. It wasn't only Sha're who deserved so much better than he could offer. He'd seduced that other Daniel so carelessly, picked him up in a prison cell, knowing from early on that he was an emotional wreck, seeing a gap in his defenses, guessing his counterpart had done him some harm and offering to heal it. But what had he really done except help himself? In his own defense he hadn't known then how it was between Daniel Jacksons and Jack O'Neills; he'd just seen another conquest; a beautiful young man who looked so lonely; trying so hard to be in charge, vulnerable and brave and irresistible as hell. And then he'd got attached to him, so quickly it should have warned him then that something significant was taking place. Wanted to protect him, care for him, had briefly toyed with the idea of being loved by him; loving him in return. But there had always been a barrier there; the way he looked so uncomfortable if O'Neill called him 'Daniel'. The name another man called him. The name the other O'Neill called him. The O'Neill that Daniel loved.

That Daniel had already been spoken for. He had trespassed on another O'Neill's territory and told himself it was his right; the other guy wasn't treating him properly; the other guy didn't deserve him; the other guy deserved to lose. Except Daniel had been the one to lose. All he'd really wanted was to have his friend love him the way he'd used to, and by horning in what had O'Neill done except make things even more difficult between them? It had felt like a triumph when he'd managed to make Daniel dimension jump to be with him but the other O'Neill had won in the end; he'd still been the one that Daniel loved, except now maybe he'd never make the move Daniel really needed him to make, too pissed about being betrayed.

He'd been given one last chance to make amends for all the selfish, stupid, inconsiderate things he'd done in his self-indulgent shallow life; he'd been given a new start with a new Daniel. Another beautiful young man, but this time the one from the right dimension, the one from his world. His Daniel. Not stolen from anyone else. He'd sworn he was going to do everything right this time. Not come on to him. Not even think about trying to seduce him. He was going to keep him safe and treat him right and be worthy of the way this Daniel looked at him; be the hero this boy thought he was, and not the worthless shit he knew himself to be. And all he'd done was drag him off to a place of danger and then fail to keep him safe. The O'Neill he'd so despised had kept that other Daniel safe for four long years of off-world missions and he'd barely managed it for four weeks.

"Sir…?"

O'Neill looked up to find Carter gazing at him with compassionate eyes. Eyes that were now their normal blue again, for which he was grateful. "Hey, Carter. How are you doing?"

She sat next to him. "Better than you, I think."

He waved a hand at her temple. "So that whole 'snake in the head' thing is working for you then?"

"It was a way to save Khenera." She looked at the floor. "I just wish we could have saved the host as well but Apophis had her killed after the…extraction. By the time Martouf and Lantash got there she was already dead and Khenara was wired up in a Goa'uld torture chamber for symbiotes."

The way she shuddered told him that she had bonded with the Tok'ra inside her well enough to remember that event and to feel the symbiote's pain. He remembered Martouf heatedly telling him once that a non-blended human had no idea what it was like to lose their symbiote, or how it felt for a symbiote to lose their host. That Jolinar must have been devastated by the loss of Roshar; that he too was… And then he'd turned away with tears in his eyes and O'Neill had belated realized that the guy had lost the woman he'd loved and all O'Neill had been doing was bawling out the Tok'ra for daring to trespass on his 2IC's soul.

"Martouf asked me if I was okay about being a Tok'ra again and I told him I was."

O'Neill looked at her for a moment. "And are you?"

She nodded gravely. "Yes. I mean it's…strange, but two of the people who…matter most to me in the world are Tok'ra." The bright spots of color on her cheekbones were the only indication of how difficult it was for her to discuss her private life. That was as close as she had ever come to admitting she loved Martouf. Thinking back he supposed it was about as close as she'd ever come to admitting she loved her father as well. "I miss Jolinar," she added hugging her knees as she sat next to him. "I've felt incomplete since she died. It was so…terrifying to have someone else in my head, but comforting as well. I was just getting used to it and then she died, and I have never felt so lonely in my life."

He knew he hadn't been a lot of help to her through that. He wasn't good at having women as friends. He didn't know how to be intimate with them in anything except a physical sense so he hadn't exactly invited confidences. He'd probably patted her on the shoulder a few times and asked her if she was okay, but the whole concept of having some wriggling worm burrowing its way into your brain, not to mention being able to control your body, had repulsed him so much he really hadn't wanted her to tell him what it had been like. When she'd chosen to internalize all her trauma about the situation he'd been cravenly relieved to be let off the hook. If Daniel had been a part of the team back then, he knew he would have been there for Carter in a way O'Neill never could but she'd been pretty much left to get on with it and she had, without complaining, but not necessarily without suffering. He and Carter got along okay because he mostly treated her like one of the guys. Life would have been easier if she'd been a lesbian, then he could have asked her what she thought of the tits on the new nurse in the infirmary or whatever, but his response to straight women in the past had always been to try to seduce them. As that was unthinkable with their working relationship, he'd thought of her as a scientist first, a soldier second, a vulnerable human being third. He'd known that the whole Jolinar business had screwed her up a lot and been appropriately angry with the Tok'ra on her behalf when they'd met them. But he had never realized quite how tough it had been for her to struggle on feeling the lack of that other self inside her; that other consciousness she had evidently been missing all this time. He asked tentatively, "Is Khenera…nice?"

She smiled at him, hugging her knees again, looking like a kid momentarily with a slightly goopy grin. He imagined her gap-toothed and gawky as a little girl and felt even more warmly towards her. Every time she was in danger it was brought home to him how much she mattered to him, damned annoying though she could be sometimes, the irritating smarter kid sister he hadn't grown up with but would probably have been a better guy if he had. 

"Yes. Very. She's not as old as Jolinar was. This is the first host she's ever lost and she's still mourning her. She really needs me right now. We're getting to know each other and it's helping to distract her from her grief, I think."

He scratched his jaw. "I'm actually finding you talking about blending with this other female…entity kind of sexy now. Is that wrong of me?"

She laughed. "You're always so reliably unevolved, colonel. In a changing world I find that pretty comforting."

"So, you're going to be okay?"

"Yes."

"And I don't need to go and break Martouf's arms and legs for sticking that symbiote in your head?"

She smiled tolerantly. "He asked me first, sir, and I am very okay about being a Tok'ra again. And he did save all our lives."

"Yes, he did." He sighed as he thought that if only Martouf had managed to swing the whole rescue thing a little earlier then Daniel would be with them now instead of being so far away on that other world. At least he didn't have to worry about him being scared; Daniel had no concept of fear of strange situations; they were too fascinating to frighten him, but that was going to make the moment when he was given to someone he couldn't win over with a bright smile and some intelligent curiosity even harder for him to bear. He didn't want Daniel to have to realize what the universe was really like. He wanted that child inside of him to stay intact forever, but how could it, given what was waiting for him at Heru'ur's citadel?

"Daniel's going to be fine, sir."

He looked at her in surprise. Her tone was very gentle, the way she spoke to Daniel, never the way she spoke to him. With a sense of shock he realized that she knew; knew he was in love with their civilian consultant. He couldn't stop the edge creeping into his voice: "Heru'ur is going to rape him, Major. How exactly is that going to make him 'fine'?"

She didn't blink. "Because I don't think it will happen, and even if it does, as long as you find him and get him away from that place, he'll be able to deal with it."

"He's just a kid. He doesn't know about…"

"He's an adult, sir. And what's more, one of the most adaptable adults I've ever met. The only thing Daniel wouldn't be able to cope with is your being dead, and you're not."

He gaped at her in what he realized was a very good impression of a goldfish. He'd used to be the suave devil-may-care unfazeable member of this team. Damnit, he'd been _cool_. Now, after two Daniel Jacksons he was a gibbering emotional wreck. No wonder the hair of that O'Neill in the other dimension had turned gray. "Are you saying…?"

She got to her feet. "I'm saying you're Daniel's whole damned world, sir." She lowered her voice, looking over her shoulder before she leant in close and whispered, "I'm saying that he loves you..."

***

Fire-lit teeth and claws, raking talons, snarls of rage, a purring sound like a rope-knot being sawed; the white burn of a new tear in flesh, the metallic taste and scent of blood, red eyes glowing, the stink of singed fur, the pincer of jaws crushing bone, the flare of fresh pain.

Part of being a warrior was knowing when you were beaten, and he could not fight so many and win. If the boy had been another warrior, well then perhaps there might have been some hope, but as things were…

Teal'c slammed his broken staff weapon against one of the snarling beasts, kicking out at another to hold it off. There was blood streaming from his neck and face, his arms slashed and torn from miew'bin teeth and claws. He was trying to keep them away from the boy, had ordered Daniel behind him, the fire guarding one approach, the bank another. He had been worried about the fire burning out but now he had to admit that he was going to be the flank that failed. He twisted his head round to find the young human standing with a burning branch in his hand, swinging it when the miew'bin approached that way. Their eyes met.

Teal'c called to him above the snarling of the miew'bin: "You must run for the woods. I will hold them here. If you gain the shelter of the trees, climb one; it will be easier to defend that position throughout the rest of the night. The miew'bin do not hunt in daylight." He swung his staff weapon again, but it was just a broken lance now, the head snapped off. He cracked it against the skull of a miew'bin and the creature fell down; but there were others behind it; there were always others.

"I'm not going without you."

Teal'c jerked his head round in surprise and saw the boy had that stubborn expression on his face again. "You will do as you are told! Run for the trees, now!"

'No." Daniel swiped with his burning branch again and the miew'bin snarling at him fell back. "Where I come from we don't leave anyone behind."

"I am your enemy."

Daniel swung the branch again, bending to snatch up another brand from the fire. "Whatever you are, without me, you're dead."

With a sense of shock, Teal'c realized that it was true. Without the young Tau'ri to hold that flank the miew'bin would be able to come at him from three sides at once and would immediately drag him down. He shook that off, saying sternly, "Do as I tell you! Run!"

"No." Daniel did not even shout it; just said it with the same quiet immovability that Teal'c had already come to recognize. "While I hold them off, you fix your staff weapon."

"It cannot be repaired."

"Well, then tie your knife to it. Do something!" Daniel snatched up another branch as he said the latter, and swung them both vigorously, shouting at the miew'bin as he did so something that Teal'c recognized as an old Goa'uld imprecation against evil spirits; some of the inflections were different, but the language was the one he had grown up speaking. He darted one shocked glance in the boy's direction, wondering briefly if he was perhaps some kind of shaman, or a genuine god from one of the old forbidden stories he had used to whisper to Ry'ac when Drey'ac was not listening; where an avatar or deity would descend from the stars in the form of a lowly beggar or injured stranger and judge humankind by the way they treated the one he appeared to be. Then he realized that this was absurd and the young human was exactly what he appeared to be: out of his depth and in need of protection, yet also stubborn, wilful, knowledgeable, compassionate even to his enemies, and astonishingly brave.

Teal'c snatched the knife from his belt and began to lash it to the broken lance of his staff weapon; forcing himself to concentrate on that even as the sparks from the whirling branches the young man was waving circled up into the sky; the shouting and slashing of fiery sticks would not hold the miew'bin for long, they were circling to assess weakness; but it was giving him this moment that he could never have snatched without the young Tau'ri's help.

"Stay close!" Teal'c shouted as the young man took a step forward to scare off a miew'bin preparing to spring. 

Daniel jumped back at once but Teal'c did not have the knife tied to the staff weapon yet and the animal was gathering itself to jump. He could only watch in horror as the huge cat flung itself at the young Tau'ri's throat, jaws open wide to snap closed on his jugular… Teal'c wondered if he should be relieved that it was going to end like this for the young human; quick and relatively clean; throat torn out with one clash of jaws, never having to know how it felt to attract the unwanted attention of a lustful Goa'uld, but still his heart turned over at the prospect, and he felt a terrible sense of loss… And then he stared in disbelief as the creature bounced off to land on its back. Daniel was still staggering backwards from the impact, but as Teal'c looked anxiously at his throat he saw no wound, just a savage dent in the metal circle around his throat. This time as the largest and most savage of miew'bin tensed in readiness to lunge at a still staggering Daniel, Teal'c was ready. He drove the makeshift spear into its heart with all his strength. Even as it howled and thrashed, he realized he had not fully grasped what it meant to be a pack animal; their willingness to make and accept sacrifice for the good of the rest; he was as defenseless as that spear went in as if he carried no weapon at all, and another lunged at him, knocking him backwards, breaking his grip on the handle of the staff weapon. 

He went down beneath a weight of furry bodies, claws and teeth tearing at him. In between the sickening pain, there were yells, the thud of burning branches hitting fur, then he heard the sucking sound of a blade being withdrawn from dead flesh. Howls from the miew'bin, and then suddenly silence.

"Teal'c…?"

He looked up into blue eyes that were full of anxiety, noticing that the young Tau'ri's neck and chest were scratched, his face bruised. He realized the miew'bin had gone; no doubt they worked on balances and if they lost too many of their pack trying to bring down a particular prey, they would decide the prey was not worth the struggle and go elsewhere in search of easier feeding. The boy must have killed one of them then. Feeling as absurdly proud as if it was his own son who had performed so well in battle, Teal'c drifted into darkness.

***

"Jack…?"

O'Neill was awake in an instant at the sound of that quiet croak. He rolled over at once. "Don't move, Daniel."

It was surprising how much warmth just their two bodies were putting out. The nights could be chilly here on the beach, a salt-flavored breeze blowing in from the sea to cool the skin, but the temporary shelter he had built from the alien equivalent of bamboo cane and banana leaves provided adequate protection, at least until the permanent shelter could be built. He had made them a sleeping pallet from the softest leaves he could find, raising them a few inches off the ground, needing to be close enough to hear if Daniel woke or stopped breathing in the night.

He switched on the flashlight, pointing the beam into the corner so Daniel wouldn't be dazzled by it, and propped himself up one elbow looking down on the conscious man and trying to remember how to form a reassuring smile. "How are you doing?"

Daniel looked down at himself; the space blanket covering him; then gazed up at Jack. His expression was enough to let O'Neill know that Daniel was still there; not brain-damaged; still Daniel, recognizing him immediately, and that incredible brain already starting to tick over. Daniel pulled down the space-blanket, no doubt seeing full well that he was naked, perhaps realizing the reason for it too, the wreckage of blood and burnt cloth that the attack had left of his uniform; taking in all those bandages, the one around his shoulder stained with blood. His voice was a husky whisper: "From the way I feel as if I've been run over by a truck, not too well I imagine. Where are we? Are Sam and Teal'c here?"

O'Neill filled him in on current events as concisely as possible, reaching out in a way he hoped was casual to feel his forehead as he did so, trying not to flinch too visibly from the burning of Daniel's skin against his hand. Still infected then. Still feverish. That nasty little gloop-releasing projectile still doing its unpleasant work even though it had been removed and so much penicillin pumped into Daniel's system.

"How long have I been unconscious?" Daniel apparently read that answer in his eyes, wincing in sympathy. "You must have been having such a fun time."

"Hey, who doesn't want to play Robinson Crusoe? And I had the sense to bring my very own Man Friday with me." O'Neill put a hand behind Daniel's head, helping him to raise it enough that he could hold the water bottle to his lips. He spoke quietly, not meeting his eyes: "You have a fever from the alien stuff that got into your bloodstream. I'm going to find a way to bring that down but in the meantime you need to take your salt tablets and drink plenty of liquid."

Daniel swallowed gratefully and painfully, his dry mouth warring with his sore throat, but his need for liquid won out and he drank until O'Neill removed the bottle and lowered his head back to the makeshift pallet. Daniel darted him another look then. "You haven't said anything about us getting out of here."

O'Neill averted his eyes again. "Let's just concentrate on getting you better for now."

He saw Daniel's blue eyes widen in comprehension, his gaze flickering around the hut, before resting on the flapping doorway through which the night sea could just be glimpsed. "Is it a…nice island?"

"It's Paradise," O'Neill assured him. "Big. Tropical. Blue sea and sandy beaches. Birds, monkeys, lots of fruit in the trees, fish in the ocean. A fresh water lagoon. The kind of place people pay a mint to fly to for vacation, and we get it all to ourselves without even the cost of a plane ticket. And okay I admit there's no bar selling those little drinks with umbrellas in them or pretty native girls in grass skirts but it's still…"

Daniel's eyes flickered closed, exhaustion weighing on his eyelids. "Sounds wonderful, Jack. Remind me to buy Sam and Teal'c a postcard." He drifted back into feverish sleep and O'Neill bowed his head in momentary defeat. Whatever that green stuff had done to Daniel, the contents of his first aid kit weren't enough to combat it. The other wounds he'd cleaned and stitched were starting to heal but that angry burn was still weeping blood and Daniel's temperature wasn't coming down. If Daniel died…

He wasn't just worried about being left here alone for the rest of his life; ending up like Ernest; a naked little old man so lonely he was almost out of his mind. It was losing Daniel he couldn't bear; the thought of never holding another conversation with him; never exchanging another glance with him; never having the benefit of his ideas; never…

Too many nevers. Too many things he would never get to do again if he lost him; too many things as well, he was now beginning to realize, that he would also never have done; and would always regret never having done; like telling Daniel how much he meant to him; how important he was to him; how it would rip out his heart if he ever lost him completely. How relieved he was there had been another Daniel Jackson on the world where that other O'Neill hung out thereby preventing Daniel from staying there. How, even if there hadn't been, this O'Neill would have come found a way to come and fetch him back. By force if necessary. How he wasn't prepared to give him up to anyone or anything, and that included nasty little projectiles that oozed alien gloop.

Instead he said nothing, taking refuge in the fact that Daniel was sleeping so any confessions would be pointless, not willing to admit that he was afraid the words might still permeate, sink into his feverish subconscious like stones dropping slowly into a silt-filled pond. He covered him with the space blanket and lay down beside him once again, determined that tomorrow he was going to find a way to make good on his promise to bring down his fever, one way or another.

***

Daniel felt a long way out of his depth. Teal'c was badly injured and had passed out. The miew'bin had savaged him with teeth and claws, one bite barely missing his jugular, claw marks raking his arms, chest, and shoulders. The big man's uniform had supplied some protection but not enough and he was bleeding from a score of injuries. Hoping, the scent didn't attract more of the miew'bin, Daniel built up the fire then found some antiseptic cloth in one pocket of his vest and used that and the water to gently bathe Teal'c's wounds, wiping the blood from his face first, thinking again what a noble face it was, how unsuited to slavery to a counterfeit deity. He looked like a leader of men, not a follower of false gods. Daniel dug around in his vest until he found some bandages and then used those to bind the worst of the wounds, wincing as he did so at how deep and angry those claw and bite mark were. He picked up the staff weapon with its blood-stained knife strapped to the end and wiped it gingerly on the grass, then he sat beside Teal'c, ready to respond at once if the man cried out or awoke and needed more doctoring, and determined that however long the dawn was in coming, he would keep watch.

The night felt endless; reminding him of nights spent as a child on the brink of one illness or another; feverish and restless; drifting into tangled dreams that seemed to last for hours then waking to discover only minutes had passed. This time all his dreams were of Colonel O'Neill and every time he woke from a confused dream of him being alive he had to endure the pain again of remembering that he was now dead. But even as his head would drop until his chin was resting on his chest, his eyelids too heavy to keep open any longer, he would keep his grip on the staff weapon, and every time he jolted back into wakefulness again he would check the amount of fuel on the fire, take another look at Teal'c to see if he was still breathing. 

By the time dawn was lightening the land, the fire had burned down to a few glowing embers and Daniel was shivering with the cold. He wondered what he should do next; Teal'c would need help, that much was obvious; if he was well enough to walk, Daniel could help him limp to the first place of habitation – which much as he hated to admit it was probably the citadel. Although his heart sank at the prospect, he realized there was no choice. He had seen how deep and savage those claw and bite marks were on the man's body; the blood loss, internal and external, would be considerable. And this was no ordinary man, he already knew that. He suspected fate had something important in mind for this Teal'c; that this might be the only man to lead his fellow Jaffa out of slavery and into a new independence from their alien 'gods'. Colonel O'Neill had told him that in another universe this Teal'c had joined them, turned against the Goa'uld, been an example to other Jaffa that had caused insurrections all across the galaxy. So somehow this Teal'c needed to be saved in the hope that he would go on and fulfill his…cosmic destiny, and Daniel had to be the one to save him, even if that meant walking into the mouth of Heru'ur's stronghold.

He was still deciding the best way to try to help the man struggle across the barren land when Teal'c opened his eyes. Daniel sprang up at once, talking to him soothingly: "It's okay. You've been hurt but I'm going to find a way to get you to the citadel. I'm sure they'll be able to give you some proper medical treatment there. Do you think if I helped you maybe you could walk…?" He broke off in confusion as he saw the scratches on the man's face had vanished. "Are you…? I mean… How are you…?" 

In one fluid movement Teal'c rose to his feet. Daniel found himself looking up at six foot four of apparently uninjured Jaffa who was gazing at him with the oddest expression on his face. Teal'c looked down at the bandages around his arms and chest and Daniel wondered if he had broken some taboo by touching him. Teal'c began to unwind them, still gazing at Daniel. "You did this…?" he asked.

Daniel hoped he wasn't about to get into serious trouble. "Um…yes. I needed to stop the bleeding and to stop infection getting into the wounds. Don't you think you ought to sit down? You lost a lot of blood and…"

That was when Teal'c finished unwinding the bandage from around his arm and Daniel saw that the gaping wound from the night before had now vanished and left no trace. His expression evidently revealed his surprise for Teal'c said gently, "Did Colonel O'Neill not tell you that the Jaffa have an immune system supplied by the immature Goa'uld symbiote we carry in our wombs?"

"Well…yes, but…" Daniel couldn't resist going closer to see for himself, running a finger over the smooth dark skin in disbelief. "But I didn't realize your immune system was so much…better than ours."

"The Goa'uld need us to be strong so that they can be strong. Except for their technology, we are the only strength they have." Teal'c finished unwinding the other bandages, Daniel unable to disguise his fascination at the way those life-threatening wounds had healed to the point where they left no trace in the space of a single night.

"Look." Teal'c pulled back his uniform to reveal a criss-crossing of flesh in his abdomen. He reached in and withdrew a pale wiggling form with a gaping scarlet mouth from which Daniel instinctively retreated.

"Ugh."

Teal'c smiled. "Is that any way to address a future god?" The way he shoved the symbiote back into the pouch revealed only contempt. "Without us they are nothing; but they have ensured that without them, we will die. The process takes place when we are too young to know that the price we pay for long life and perfect health granted by the love our god bears for us, is in fact a slavery from which the only escape is death."

"A Faustian bargain," Daniel murmured. "But you didn't sell your souls, you sold your humanity. And your children's humanity."

"My child would never have become a Jaffa." Teal'c reached for the water bottle and pointed to the ground. "And it maybe that although we can no longer be human, we can still keep our humanity. Sit."

Daniel looked at him cautiously. "Why?" Fascinating as it was to be up this close and personal with an entirely different cultural outlook, the downside was that he couldn't always anticipate what Teal'c was going to say or do next.

Teal'c took his arm and quite gently pushed him down onto his seat. "Because in your anxiety over my injuries, you entirely failed to tend to your own."

"Oh." Daniel looked down at himself in surprise and realized there was a reason why his arms were stinging as though he'd been dragged through a briar patch. A moment later, Teal'c was bathing his bruised cheekbone and dabbing at the cuts and scratches on his arms with matter-of-fact kindness. After a few minutes of careful doctoring, the Jaffa reached for the remote Apophis had given him and pressed it with something like hatred, and Daniel felt the collar around his neck unlock with a soft hiss of technology. Teal'c abruptly pulled it from his neck and threw it into the distance. When Daniel gaped at him, the Jaffa did not meet his eye, only muttering, "It was damaged by the miew'bin. It was no longer functional." 

Daniel said gently, "What happened to your son? You spoke of him in the past tense. Is he…?"

"Dead?" Teal'c's voice was harsh. "Yes. Killed by followers of Cronos, just as my father was killed by Cronos himself."

"Apophis's enemy." Daniel realized for the first time what he was up against. This wasn't a case of trying to persuade an intelligent man that the alien who controlled his life was no god. This was a case of trying to persuade an honorable man from a culture that considered the avenging of a murdered father any loving son's first obligation, that he should consider that obligation less important than the life of a stranger. 

Teal'c was tending to Daniel's arm with surprising dexterity; the same fingers which looked as if they could crush the life from enemies with one twist, gently brushing dirt from the wound before bandaging it with a swift efficiency that reminded Daniel almost unbearably of Colonel O'Neill. He looked at the scrap of dirty bandage that was still wound around his hand; remembered the man looking at him and saying 'you're irreplaceable'. Tears came into his eyes again and he found a dull resignation sweeping through him. Perhaps there was some argument he could offer Teal'c to prove to him why delivering Daniel up to Heru'ur was the wrong thing to do, but he had neither the energy nor the inclination. What did it matter what Heru'ur did to him as Colonel O'Neill was already dead?

"There is always hope," said Teal'c, exactly as if he could read his mind. Daniel looked at him in surprise and then remembered people telling him that he had a speaking countenance. It was true that he'd never been a good liar. He'd never been entirely convinced of the value of lies when the truth was generally so much more interesting.

His voice sounded so thick and harsh he barely recognized it. "Realistically, what hope was there for Colonel O'Neill and the others? We both know they must be dead by now."

Teal'c said, "When grief is fresh it feels as if it will bleed forever, but in the end, however deep a wound it may be, it does eventually heal."

Daniel rose to his feet, looking at the sun coming up, the low plain stretching out ahead of him looking like a sea of blood; gold gilding the horizon line. Bleak and alien though this was, there was a beauty in it he was glad to look upon. If this was to be his last sunrise it was at least spectacular. "Promise me that when you've avenged your father and your son you will help free your people?"

Teal'c stared at him in confusion. "What does it matter to you if my people are free or not?"

"Do you promise?" Daniel pressed.

Teal'c looked at him for a moment and then said, "I do not always keep my promises, Daniel. I promised my father I would avenge him at any cost. I promised my son on the day he was born that I would always keep him safe. I promised Apophis I would always serve him faithfully. My promises are of no use to you. Are you ready to move on?"

Daniel looked at the sunrise again and thought of the blood spreading in a pool from Colonel O'Neill's corpse; the same way it had spread from Casey; the Colonel's brown eyes open but sightless; this sunrise like every other sunrise from now on, something the Colonel would never see. Daniel nodded. "I'm ready," he said.

 

He missed the young Tau'ri's chatter. He kept waiting for the boy to reason with him; to tell him that what he was doing was wrong; that to deliver to an enemy known to be both cruel and depraved a prisoner who had risked his own life to protect your own was the act of a man without honor or conscience. He kept waiting for the arguments to be voiced by Daniel; that as a scholar of learning, as a member of one of the few races who were determined to overcome the Goa'uld, Teal'c could do few things more effective for the good of his people than to help Daniel to escape and to deliver him back safely to the Tau'ri. That he should use this opportunity to prove to the people of Earth, with their technology the Goa'uld had not yet either mastered or stolen, that the Jaffa were not their enemies, but potential allies who, like the Tok'ra, the Tau'ri should assist. But Daniel said nothing at all. 

He walked much faster than he had the day before, despite the bruises and scratches on his body from when the miew'bin had attacked him, apparently as eager to reach the Citadel today as he had been to avoid it before. But behind the misery in his eyes there was a martyred light which Teal'c had every reason to mistrust. The boy thought that he had come to grips with reality; accepted his fate and was even willing to embrace it; but he still had no idea what his fate was going to be; still imagined it was death rather than dishonor which awaited him in the Citadel of Heru'ur.

The nearer they drew to the citadel the more Teal'c found the silence making Daniel's arguments for him. He advanced up the stone steps of Heru'ur's stronghold between hawk-headed statues, presented his documentation to the Jaffa who clashed staff weapons to block his entry, and told them he would explain his business to no one but Heru'ur, all with a feeling of sickness and self-hatred growing in his breast. Daniel stood staring straight ahead as the Jaffa of Heru'ur looked him over and smiled slyly amongst themselves, refusing to make eye contact with any of them or to show even a flicker of fear, even when they ran instruments to test for levels of naquadah across his body and insisted on binding his wrists behind his back. Again, Teal'c felt that unwilling spasm of pride at his conduct. But as soon as they were inside the citadel Teal'c noticed that his natural curiosity could not entirely be suppressed. Even though the boy firmly believed that he was going to his death, there was a part of him still fascinated by the writing on the walls, trying to decipher several panels before, after a very obvious internal struggle, turning to Teal'c and asking for a translation. 

"How do you pronounce this sign here? And what does this mean?"

They walked slowly through the corridors with Teal'c quietly translating for him; noticing with surprise how quickly Daniel recognized new words once they had been pointed out to him and he had heard them said aloud, becoming caught up in the joy of learning despite himself. He kept forgetting his hands were bound and trying to point, but quickly learned to jerk his head in the direction of the problematic signs instead.

"So I'm this word here – 'khenu'? 'Visitor'?"

Teal'c sighed. "No, Daniel, you are this sign here – 'sebi'. 'Bound captive'."

Daniel looked momentarily mutinous, an under the eyelashes reproachful look darted in Teal'c's direction that seared him to the soul. Then he was distracted by another symbol. "That's what you're hoping for, isn't it? That Apophis and Heru'ur will make a 'sema' against Cronos?"

"Yes."

"You do know that Cronos being defeated will mean the death of tens of thousand of Jaffa, and probably a hundred times that number of ordinary people as well?" Daniel nodded at the walls again. "Colonel…Colonel O'Neill said that when the system lords are at war with one another they wipe out entire planets just to cut down on each other's armies, or to ruin a 'harvest' of slaves. Isn't that what will happen in the event of all-out war between Apophis and Cronos? A scorched earth policy? Don't the Goa'uld burn all the crops to starve out each other's armies? Don't they slaughter innocent people to wipe out future generations that might otherwise grow up to become enemy Jaffa? And won't that be inevitable if Cronos knows that Apophis and Heru'ur have made an alliance? Won't they then be too powerful to ignore?"

"You told me you were not a soldier," Teal'c said quietly while he mentally still reeled from the truth of the young man's words. "How do you know so much about military strategy?"

"Because I study the past, and the past is full of wars. All of human history is drenched in human blood. The rise and fall of civilizations makes for fascinating study, but I've always thought living through it would probably be less pleasant. There's a good reason why it's a curse to wish for someone to live in interesting times." Daniel looked at him and sighed. "I somehow doubt that if there's a war Cronos will be the first one to die."

Teal'c realized he had known this always; in the back of his mind; in the hidden regions of his heart; he had always known that war between the system lords equaled death to many thousands of Jaffa. And more often than not wars between system lords were fought not just in the cold of space but the villages and towns of captive worlds. He had seen the crops burnt; the thriving towns turned to rubble. It was part of what war had always been. The gods fought for supremacy and their slaves died in their thousands. To avenge a father's death no sacrifice should be too much… And yet his father had been but one man, however noble, however beloved. How many other sons' fathers would he kill if he helped cement this alliance? How much blood must be spilt before finally Cronos's life was stolen from him? 

"With the help of the Tok'ra there may be another way. A way to get you close enough to Cronos to kill him yourself."

"Why do you care?" Teal'c demanded in exasperation.

Daniel looked him in the eyes and there was nothing but truth in those blue depths; someone who had never learned the value of lies. "Because, however important it may be to you and to your culture for you to avenge your father's death, I think we both know you're needed for a higher destiny than that. You have to free your people. You have to…"

"Kree!"

The harsh order from the waiting Horus guards made them both start. With a sense of shock, Teal'c realized they had reached the chamber of Heru'ur. He had, despite all his doubts and indecision, brought the young Tau'ri here, and there was now no option but to hand him over.

 

As they entered the chamber, Teal'c noticed that Daniel's gaze went not to the impressive figure who rose from the vast bed to stare at them with such arrogance, but to the room itself, the paintings on the walls depicting different battles in which Heru'ur had triumphed, a slight frown creasing his forehead as he leant forward to try to make out the fine detail of the farthest illustrations.

"What is the meaning of this intrusion?" Heru'ur purred, wrapping a robe around himself that did nothing to hide the lean strength of his figure, or the way the muscles on his chest and forearms gleamed and rippled. But by the way his gaze had gone at once to the young Tau'ri captive, a lazy assessment that mentally undressed him in a way too pointed for anyone but Daniel himself to ignore, Teal'c guessed he knew full well what this intrusion meant.

In a voice thick with emotion he managed to get out that he brought a tribute from his lord Apophis, who wished to make an alliance with Lord Heru'ur against the tyrant traitor Cronos, who conspired behind both their backs to steal their territories and bring low their armies. They were words he would have said with power once; he knew he had it in him to be a good orator, but today he hardly cared what Heru'ur thought of this alliance; did not care if hatred for Cronos could be ignited in his breast, or only indifference; did not care to feed the ever-hungry yearning for power in Heru'ur or any other Goa'uld. He just wanted him to stop looking at the young Tau'ri as if he were already his property.

Heru'ur advanced towards them with lithe grace. He reminded Teal'c of the miew'bin, the same power in those strong thigh muscles, the same concentration in his malevolent golden gaze.

Still not looking at Heru'ur, Daniel murmured to Teal'c, "So, is that the downfall of Set? Is he Osiris's brother in this world or – " Teal'c realized that far from being oblivious of the danger of his situation, Daniel was seeking to hang on to their relationship in the teeth of this new factor of Heru'ur. He was also refusing to give Heru'ur any power over him by not meeting his gaze. The tactics of a proud man who refused to bow down before his oppressors. Not the tactics of man likely to see the sense of submitting meekly to Heru'ur's demands and thinking of something else until the ordeal was over. Teal'c realized that he should have warned him; should have advised him; should have given him a lecture on the importance of choosing one's battles wisely.

Heru'ur was right in front of him now. He looked down at Daniel and then ran the back of his finger up his cheek. The words were addressed to Teal'c but the gaze never flickered from Daniel's face as he answered in Goa'uld: "Tell your master, Heru'ur thanks him for his tribute, and accepts it. He will think about the possibility of an alliance."

Daniel moistened his lips and while looking somewhere past Heru'ur's ear said quietly in English, "You know there are other people you could make an alliance with."

Heru'ur looked as shocked by Daniel's comment as if his food had addressed him from his plate. "Speak only when spoken to!"

Daniel looked up at him, meeting his gaze for the first time. "You could make an alliance with the Tau'ri. We're stronger than you think. We – "

Teal'c flinched from the blow, instinctively taking a step forward before he realized what he was doing. When Daniel looked at Heru'ur there was no reproach in his gaze, just a level-eyed dislike. He said quietly, "Apophis will stab you in the back the first chance he gets. So will any other Goa'uld. We will at least – "

Another blow; the other side of Daniel's face this time, knocking him to the floor. Heru'ur looked down at the bound, dazed captive, at the blood trickling from the right side of his mouth, and nodded in satisfaction. He waved a dismissive hand at Teal'c. "Leave us."

Teal'c made to go forward to help Daniel to his feet and then exercised all the self-control he had to back up, one unwilling step at a time, taking himself away from temptation, away from betraying his father by destroying an alliance that would help to destroy Cronos, albeit at the cost of so many Jaffa and human lives. Outside the chamber, he leant against the wall, breathing quickly. The two Horus guards darted him a curious glance before returning to gazing straight at the opposite wall. Given the open door to the chamber though it was obvious that they would hear everything that took place; no doubt gaining some vicarious pleasure from overhearing what they could not actually watch. Or perhaps they would watch. As soon as Teal'c was no longer here to make them keep up this show of being perfect guards, without curiosity or feelings of their own, would they be pressing their eyes to the gap between the ornate golden doors to watch the Tau'ri slave degraded and defeated for Heru'ur's pleasure?

Teal'c closed his eyes, trying to blot out images of Heru'ur abusing the young Tau'ri, perhaps giving him to these two Jaffa when he was done with him. He darted a look at them, and saw that although they were making a show of indifference, they were both intent on listening to what was taking place in that ornate chamber. They had both begun to smell of anticipation and he felt something like hatred for them being to tighten around his heart.

"…not that I'm not flattered by the suggestion, but I'm afraid you're not really my type…"

Daniel was angry. Behind the politeness there was an unmistakable undercurrent of contempt. Had the boy no sense at all? No doubt rapists deserved nothing but disgust, but when they had the power of life and death over you, was it not sensible to avoid letting one's scorn for them show? Teal'c winced at the sound of another blow. 

"Well, thank you, that makes you seem so much more attractive to me than you did a minute ago – Ah!"

Teal'c leant his head against the wall while his fingers reached for his knife as if they had a mind of their own.

Another cry from Daniel, and this time there was an edge of panic underneath it that went to his heart like a stabwound. Heru'ur had seized one of his bound wrists and twisted it, Teal'c guessed. Now he was twisting his arms up his back while he forced Daniel down onto the bed. The Goa'uld had no interest in who or what this boy was; how fast he was at picking up the Goa'uld language; how much courage and mule-headed loyalty he had shown to a man who had shown him none, just because Teal'c was alive and more or less human and there might be good in him somewhere; no interest in anything except that he had a young firm body which Heru'ur would gain pleasure from violating…

"Don't…"

Although Daniel was talking through gritted teeth, Teal'c was sure he could hear a flicker of fear there as well. He saw the two Jaffa guarding the door exchange a brief glance of satisfaction.

"You don't have to do this… You don't have to be like this… What about the host whose body you stole? You're making him a part of this when…"

The cry of pain from Daniel was so sharp Teal'c found himself reacting before he had time to realize a decision had already been made. Even as he thought he was still debating what to do next, the blood of the first Jaffa was spraying across his hand from a slashed throat. He wheeled and spun, slamming his forearm into the face of the second Jaffa as he made to bring up his staff weapon, then he was on top of him and they were grappling. Keeping him silent seemed the most important task, so that Heru'ur would have no warning; pushing his thumbs into the Jaffa's throat so no air could get through; squeezing harder and harder; wanting to see the other's eyeballs pop in his head; blood roaring in his own ears as the other one grabbed desperately at Teal'c's throat; a race to see which of them lost consciousness first. But he was angrier and better motivated. He felt the Jaffa's throat crushed under his fingers and felt nothing but satisfaction. Was he killing Heru'ur, himself, or this Jaffa on the suspicion he might have enjoyed Daniel after the Goa'uld had done with him? The Jaffa went limp in his grasp and to make sure Teal'c snapped his neck; not caring for the moment if this one had brothers or parents who might mourn him; just wanting anyone who didn't think Heru'ur deserved to die for what he was doing to Daniel to die with him.

As he entered the chamber, he felt as if he was moving outside of his own body; as if he were invisible and silent, a ghost already dead who could not therefore be killed. On the bed, Daniel had been forced onto his knees. He was fighting but his clothes were in rags and with his wrists tied behind his back there was little he could do against someone so much stronger than he was. The only reason he had not been violated already was because Heru'ur was enjoying watching him struggle, a look of contemptuous amusement on his face as Daniel fought with everything he had and realized it was not going to be enough. Heru'ur ran a hand through Daniel's hair, pulling his head back then leaning in to lick the side of his face. Daniel flinched away in contempt, but there was a flicker of panic in his eyes at the realization that this really was going to happen to him. He tried to twist away, shouting, "Teal'c…!"

The plea in Daniel's voice would have pierced his heart if he had not already been on his way to assist him. As he passed it, Teal'c's fingers closed around a solid gold statue of Heru'ur which stood upon a pedestal; the god in all his falcon-headed magnificence gleaming with quiet confidence. There was disbelief in the cry as well; unable to think that the man he had thought had so much good in him could truly have abandoned him to such a shabby fate.

Heru'ur yanked Daniel up higher, fingers tight in his honey-colored hair, whispering things in his ear in Goa'uld that Daniel would only imperfectly understand. He kissed his cheek with mocking tenderness, while his other hand stroked his smooth skin, burrowing under his torn clothes. Daniel turned his head away, disgust on his face, body rigid with loathing and contempt. "Very godlike," he breathed softly. "But if you're so powerful, how come I'm still finding you as repulsive as I did when I walked in the door? Could it be because all you really are is a parasite hitching a lift inside a walking corpse?" 

"You will pay for that, slave." Heru'ur jerked his head back savagely, pulling open his own robe as he moved forward with unmistakable purpose.

Teal'c hit him with everything he had. He usually tried not to let anger interfere with his actions; killed men because they were his enemy, or would kill him if he did not; but this was rage. Even when Heru'ur's skull crumpled out of shape, he hit him again, and again, then dragged the bleeding body from the bed. 

"Teal'c?"

Daniel was looking at him wide-eyed over his shoulder, twisted around uncomfortably with his wrists still bound behind his back. Blood was running from his mouth and there was a bruise coming out on his face, but he gave Teal'c a smile of great sweetness. "Miss me?"

Teal'c refused to let his mouth twitch into an answering smile although his heart already felt much lighter. "I was not aiming for you."

Daniel grinned then darted a glance at the corpse on the floor, the humor on his face turning to compassion at the grim sight. "I feel sorry for the host."

"The host is better off dead." Teal'c cut through the bonds around Daniel's wrists. "It is ensuring that he stays dead which is now a priority."

"He looks pretty permanently dead to me, Teal'c."

"He could still be revived in a sarcophagus." He cut through the last piece of rope. "We must ensure that this does not happen."

Daniel looked around the room. "How?"

"I have a plan." Teal'c could not entirely suppress another smile as the young human looked at him in undisguised admiration. He had forgotten how much sweeter it was to act wisely or bravely or with unusual skill when there was someone who looked up to you to notice that you had done so. Having had the unconditional love and respect of a child, it had been very difficult to lose it. He supposed that was how it was for those who truly believed in the Goa'uld as gods; imagining their every good deed, their every act of courage, was noted down by their omniscient lord and kept account of in some divine ledger. For those men and women, to lose their faith would be to lose the point of their existence; every action done so that it could be observed, and judged, and hopefully approved. Even he, it seemed, had needed to see his own life reflected in someone else's eyes, but with him it had been the eyes, not of his god, but of his son. And now he found his own actions being reflected back to him by the admiring and approving eyes of this Daniel. He realized that if O'Neill had survived then the man could be made to defeat the Goa'uld somehow; not just because of his natural ingenuity, the stubbornness of the Tau'ri, and the skill they had shown in manufacturing weapons for themselves that were independent of any naquadah technology; O'Neill would defeat the Goa'uld just to please Daniel; just for the moment of seeing his own triumph reflected back to him in those over-sized blue eyes. 

Teal'c strode to the doorway, seized one of the dead Jaffa in each hand and hauled them into the room then closed the door behind them. Daniel was across the room and helping him in a moment. "How do we get to carry the corpse of a god out of here without being challenged?"

"We do not attempt it." Teal'c took hold of the first guard's shoulders and began to drag him across the floor. "We carry out the corpse of an insignificant Horus Guard instead."

Daniel looked at him sideways. "You're much sneakier than you look, Teal'c."

"And you are much more dangerous than you first appear also, Daniel."

Daniel half-laughed a little bitterly as he helped drag one of the corpses across the floor. "I don't think 'dangerous' is exactly how I'd describe myself." 

"But you have that special power usually given only to courtesans, children, and cats, and it can be very dangerous indeed."

The blue eyes blinked at him in confusion and an expression hovering somewhere between suspicion and curiosity washed across the young man's face. "What power?"

Teal'c tried not to smile and failed. "The power to make others want to do exactly what you wish." 

***

He had tried to mend the 'gate, he really had. He'd peered at connections and tried moving things by hand, even had a go at a little soldering but at the end of several hours of fruitless effort he'd had to concede defeat. He didn't know what he was doing and the overload of power that had sent them through the 'gate in the first place, presumably on the end of a split stream, had blown whatever circuitry the thing possessed. It was a dead 'gate he had no means to repair or knowledge even of what needed to be done to attempt to repair it and they were stuck here on the wrong end of a rogue wormhole on what was most probably the far side of the universe.

If they had to be stranded on the wrong world O'Neill had to admit this was a beautiful spot in which to have ended up. And if you were going to book with your intergalactic travel agent to be hurled millions of miles off course through a hostile universe then it was best to do it on the first day of a new mission when you had two packs and two vests filled with everything the Air Force calculated you needed to survive in a hostile environment. Not that the environment could have been described as in any way hostile… They were on the golden beach of a turquoise sea, near the edge of a lagoon of almost unbearable blueness which teemed with fish. Anything piscine that was brightly colored or had spikes he'd ignored on the grounds that such coloration more likely to make them poisonous, but he had fashioned himself a spear out of a branch and Daniel's knife and caught several that looked harmless. It had been a slow business testing a tiny fragment of the cooked flesh to see how he reacted to it, but so far everything he'd tried had been edible and although his concern about disease had led to the fish being a little overdone, he hadn't thrown up yet. He was saving the MREs for Daniel at the moment. Sooner or later he was going to have to start feeding his teammate local produce but as a bout of diarrhea would probably dehydrate him to death in his present weakened-and-getting-weaker state so far O'Neill was getting the fresh grilled fish, and Daniel, for all his sniffing of the air and weak murmurs that something smelt nice was getting macaroni and cheese, beef stew, cheese tortellini, and chicken with salsa, courtesy of the USAF, even if they did all taste like chicken. 

Feeding Daniel was a struggle as he had a permanent temperature that varied between low to terrifyingly high, had either infected kidneys or kidneys damaged by blood loss, no appetite, needed to be spoonfed, and when his temperature was even higher than usual would turn his head away exactly like a difficult five year old. Much wheedling, pleading and bullying had to be employed to get him to swallow stuff down which he didn't like at the best of times and now hated with the kind of passion toddlers usually reserved for their vegetables. To add to both of their frustration, half the time he would bring up the food O'Neill had just spent half an hour so laboriously getting him to swallow. He also had to be washed and helped to relieve himself, which O'Neill had no problem with at all but which Daniel found humiliating. Although O'Neill had told him again and again that if he needed to pee and O'Neill wasn't back from foraging to help him outside he should just go where he was, he kept aggravating his aching kidneys by hanging on until O'Neill got back. 

O'Neill found that his own fish and fruit diet was pretty good for vitamin and protein intake but still a little loosening to the bowels. The fruit testing had been slow and laborious, as, if the trees on the island had been originally brought here by Goa'uld intent on terraforming new worlds for their new slaves, they had evolved considerably from their origins. Things that looked like grapefruit tasted more like oranges, and the coconuts were wrapped in shiny purple coverings that had to be cut away carefully before the nut husk was revealed. This coconut matting was perfect fire fuel and O'Neill was hoarding it like a miser. He had matches for the moment, certainly, but he was thinking long term. If Daniel lived, they were probably going to be here for the rest of their lives. If Daniel didn't… Well, he wasn't even going to think about that as a possibility. Daniel was going to get better. The antibiotic shots he was so doggedly giving him once a day were going to start working before they ran out, or somehow, through a method that hadn't come to him yet, he was going to find a way to save his life. He'd painstakingly tested the fruit, and found that the coconut milk, although a little laxative-like, was refreshing and sweet, and the juice from the orangefruit tasted like a mixture of grapefruit and orange juice, just as one would expect from its appearance. He wasn't sharing those with Daniel yet either, preferring to work his way through the USAF issue fruit drink; something else Daniel had always detested, but as it was stuffed full of sugar, O'Neill was forcing him to drink it. He still didn't know if the blinding headache Daniel kept complaining of was the result of his injuries or common caffeine withdrawal. If they'd been back in the infirmary he was sure Doc Fraiser would have let him have his coffee, one less thing for Daniel to have to deal with in his weakened state, but he was too scared of the alien nature of the green goop. What if caffeine acted as some kind of fatal accelerant or increased its toxicity ten fold? When Daniel was clinging so precariously to life he was afraid to put anything into his system that might cause complications until he was out of danger. At the moment 'out of danger' felt as far away as the horizon line upon which there was never a glimpse of any ship.

He'd explored the island and found it was teeming with life; so many different varieties of plants and trees and birds and monkeys and fish and insects and reptiles and crustaceans it made the head swim. He could only make short forays because his terror that something would happen to Daniel while he was away made the panic bubble up every quarter of an hour or so and sent him sprinting back to the beach to check on him.

There was certainly no shortage of things to do. He was building a permanent shelter out of the local equivalent of bamboo and atap leaves. Actually constructing it was fine, he could do that within sight of the makeshift shelter in which Daniel was sleeping; it was having to go out to collect up the materials that made the panic spike. That was why he was using these thinner lianas to bind the structure together and not those better ones he'd found deeper in; these would withstand anything except a tropical storm; reasoning that if the weather patterns here were the same as on earth, a tropical storm would level everything anyway, and this way he got to stay closer to Daniel. The trees on the outer perimeter of the island were like coconut palms, and they would bend in any wind, however fierce, but the ones further in were protected by the way the land dipped into a deep jungle valley, and that was like a slice of the Amazon rain forest. He presumed the hurricane passed over the top of that part of the island, bending all the coconut palms to the ground, stripping the vegetation from the topmost peaks but leaving that secret valley untouched. That was where he'd found the ruins. That was where he'd started crying because Daniel would have found them so fascinating, and unless a miracle occurred, Daniel was going to die in this place without ever having seen them.

 

As he ducked into the darkness of the tent he saw Daniel was awake, waiting for him. The relief on his face as O'Neill came back carried more than a hint of desperation on his face that needed no explanation. O'Neill looped an arm around him and hauled him up, snatching at the space blanket, to cover his modesty because even now Daniel was weird about O'Neill seeing him naked. They barely made it outside before the hiss of hot urine hitting the sand reached his ears. Daniel turned his head away in embarrassment, murmuring, "Sorry."

O'Neill gripped him tighter, wondering how Daniel could imagine he cared if some piss got on his booted feet when he spent every day wrestling with the thought of losing his best friend. He spoke hoarsely: "I need your help."

"What?" Daniel's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "O-kay. What do you…?"

"You're smarter than I am. I need to pick your brains."

"My brains are a little fried by the temperature I'm running at the moment, Jack." 

It was a relief to see that glimmer of a smile, that very normal-sounding tone. O'Neill gently maneuvered him away from the puddle of urine on the beach back into the cool darkness of the shelter. "Supposing I was the one with the fever. Supposing you were where I am right now. What would you be doing to try and find me a cure?"

O'Neill saw what he'd been hoping to see: the brain engaged light go on in those shadowed eyes. His voice a rasp from his sore throat, Daniel said: "Describe the island to me again. Tell me everything you've found so far."

There was still some orange drink left over from earlier and O'Neill took the opportunity to ease Daniel down onto the sleeping pallet, propping him into a sitting position and holding the cup to his lips while he described what he'd discovered. As he'd hoped, Daniel was distracted enough to swallow without the usual complaints about how vile, vile, _vile_ that stuff was. 

"Okay…so, tropical…? Caribbean on the outer rim, more like South America in the center?"

O'Neill nodded. "On the perimeter it's all coconut palms and sea birds. There's a high peak in the center then at the base of that there's this deep valley that is either on their equivalent of the equator or maybe on a fault-line, because it's hot, humid, and it rains there every day. As soon as you're better I'll show you the ruins. There's an old temple place you're going to love." 

A wistful smile from Daniel at the thought of that; the thought of being well enough to walk anywhere again, let alone a couple of miles to an abandoned temple. He collected himself with a visible effort, hardly noticing as O'Neill took the empty cup away and dipped a cloth into the bowl of water he kept by the pallet on which Daniel slept. Daniel said thoughtfully, "Well, if it were me, I'd check out the rainforest. They estimate that on earth there may be the cure to just about everything locked away in those trees and plants – the ones we're burning down at such a rate you can see the smoke trail from space, incidentally, just so we can all eat more cheeseburgers and die of heart failure at an earlier age – so it could be that in the bark, or the flowers, or the fruit, or the leaves of one of the plants on this island there is an antidote to whatever it is that's got into my bloodstream." Daniel met his gaze as O'Neill gently bathed his temples. "It's also a very real possibility that a team of trained botanists working seven days a week couldn't extract anything useful from any plant on this island for a decade."

"Okay." O'Neill nodded with new determination. He could at least experiment with the plant life. Anything was better than just watching his store of antibiotics used up day by day, holding off the fever for an hour or so before it came back with renewed force. All he was doing at the moment was delaying the inevitable, not finding a cure, Daniel was still a little sicker and weaker every day, another slide further down the gravel pit toward the abyss. "Thanks." He put down the bowl. "You going to be okay for a while?"

Daniel's eyes betrayed the sharpness of his disappointment that O'Neill was leaving him again so soon, but he tried to sound cheerful: "I'll be fine."

Seared by the glimpse of abandonment in those blue eyes, O'Neill almost launched into an explanation of how he knew this might be the last few days they had together, damnit. Did Daniel think he was the only one who was counting every minute? Did he think O'Neill wanted to leave him here? Did he think he was getting out of the sickroom because he couldn't bear to sit there and watch his friend die; too much of a coward to deal with the reality of it so pretending to be busy elsewhere? Maybe he had it in him to be like that, but not this time; this time all he wanted to do was be with Daniel; to sit there and watch him sleep and burn the memory of his face into his mind; but he could either sit there and savor their last time together or he could fight to keep him alive. And even if Daniel was ready to drift slowly towards oblivion he wasn't prepared to watch it happen, not when there was anything that could be tried that might work.

He tried to sound brisk. "I'll be back soon."

Daniel gave him a sickly smile. "Drop in anytime."

Fighting not to get mushy was proving to be more of a problem with each passing day. He was having to lock down his natural instinct to be tactile; to take Daniel in his arms and hold him tightly. But Daniel wasn't a child or a relative, and he had somehow wandered across a line that made it difficult for them to be ordinary friends. Any soppy stuff from O'Neill and Daniel was going to think he was doomed for sure, and in a battle like this half the fight was convincing all parties that survival was an attainable goal. So he didn't hug him and breathe in the scent of his hair; he just touched him gently on the face, the barest stroke of one callused thumb across his unshaven jaw, eyes too full of feelings he knew he ought to hide; all that fear and doubt and panic at the thought of losing him. But his voice sounded calm enough as he said, "I'll be back in an hour. Try to sleep."

Daniel nodded but he didn't close his eyes. O'Neill knew he was watching him as he climbed out of the shelter, and that even after he was out of sight, Daniel was lying there in his urine and sweat-scented fever prison trying to hear the noiseless echoes of booted feet on sun-warmed sand.

***

He had never expected to find himself bonding with some ancient guy with a snake in his guts but he had lost a part of himself on this journey and only this unreadable old warrior seemed to know where he might be able to find it again. Perhaps part of the reason they had bonded was because they'd both lost someone they cared about. What made it stranger was that they had lost them in the same place.

Martouf had put the tel'tak down in the chilly forests to the north of the city of Chulak as silently and as sweetly as a fish set loose from a line slipping back into the sea. But still Bra'tac and a handful of Jaffa had been waiting for them as they touched down. They'd yelled who they were and what they wanted back and forward a few times without making any headway and then O'Neill had mentioned 'Teal'c' and it had been like 'open sesame' to Ali Baba.

So now they were waiting. Chulak was a place abandoned by its god, the main structure a stone and marble temple to the greater glory of Apophis whose walls were now stained slightly green with neglect. Like Abydos to Ra, visited infrequently, replaced in Apophis's affections by worlds with better climates and richer harvests. The news of his death was spreading tentatively out from the city, not a forest fire of rumor, just a slow trickle of whispers and dread. Delegations were starting to arrive from outlying places asking Bra'tac if it was really true. Bra'tac was giving speeches about how a new era of freedom was dawning for the men, women and children of Chulak and every other world enslaved by Apophis, but others were either denying that a god could die or saying that the reality would be enslavement by Heru'ur or Cronos. Bra'tac and Martouf shared the respectful distance of enemies turned allies, both suspicious of the other yet recognizing an integrity they shared. Bra'tac had needed a lot of convincing that the Tok'ra really did have an equal partnership with their hosts, just as Martouf had needed a lot of convincing that there were Jaffa capable of independent thought rather than simply brainwashed slaves to their oppressors. 

O'Neill still thought they should have gone to Heru'ur's world but they would have had to ditch the tel'tak to do that, the place too far away to be reached by anything but Stargate, and he'd already learned that once the Tok'ra got their sticky fingers on any Goa'uld technology, they didn't give it up without a fight. Even when he'd made scathing references to poor relations fighting over stolen underwear, Martouf had simply given him one of those level looks that made him want to throw something heavy at his head and said that there were Tok'ra operatives in Heru'ur's citadel who might be able to send news to them soon.

O'Neill knew they wouldn't intervene though. No Tok'ra operative who'd wormed his way into a place of trust in Heru'ur's command was going to blow his cover to stop some Tau'ri getting hurt. Their minds were always on higher greater things than the health or safety of one individual. They might regret the ill-treatment of a human slave but they had seen thousands die over the centuries; freedom was everything to them; always the big picture, never the fine detail; always the survival of the whole forest, not the fall of a single leaf from a single tree. 

He'd told Martouf to put him and Kawalsky down and let them go and look for Daniel himself but Martouf had insisted that as Chulak was the nearest world with a Stargate it made more sense for them all to travel to that world together. Then once they'd reached Chulak they had sent a message back to Hammond letting him know their plans only to be told unequivocally that they were to come back at once. O'Neill had told him flat out that nothing was persuading him to come back to the SGC without Daniel and instead of bawling him out, Hammond had said gently that he could not authorize a trip to Heru'ur's world and indeed strictly forbade any such thing but he could authorize a diplomatic mission to try to engage the rebel Jaffa of Apophis as allies. Ever since Hammond had heard about the rebel Jaffa in Doc's universe he had been keen on making that same connection in this universe and he probably thought this was a great concession, but the last thing O'Neill felt like doing was making nice with ex-serpent guards when for all he knew Daniel was being handed around Heru'ur's Jaffa even now. But going back to the SGC felt like giving up, and at least this way he got to stay this side of the 'gate. So now they were a liaison unit, supposed to be facilitating diplomatic relations between the Tok'ra and the Bra'tac-led Jaffa of Chulak but in reality just counting the days, hours and minutes until he found out what had become of Daniel. 

Bra'tac seemed to think that as Daniel was with Teal'c he was safe, end of story, but the last time O'Neill had seen Daniel he was being dragged off by Teal'c to hand over to Heru'ur. Further questioning of Bra'tac revealed Teal'c had a grudge match going with Cronos that made Apophis securing an alliance with Heru'ur important to him. Bra'tac was adamant Teal'c would do the right thing, but what if the right thing as Teal'c saw it was to keep Heru'ur sweet by any means necessary? O'Neill had forgotten what it was to sleep and everything he ate hissed in his clenched guts like rain on a hot sidewalk.

Martouf had assured him that they had operatives in that area who were trying to discover what had happened after Apophis's First Prime and his prisoner arrived on Heru'ur's world. In the meantime, Jacob was on his way and Martouf was looking a little nervous at the prospect. Kawalsky was mooching around, trying to bum cigarettes off Jaffa who had never heard of nicotine and to explain the rules of football to people whose only equivalent was killing the armies of rival Goa'uld. Carter was getting to know the Tok'ra in her head, not to mention Martouf, a whole lot better, and he… He was taking advice from a hundred and thirty five year old guy who had spent the last century of his life in service to an alien parasite.

Bra'tac had tried to teach him how to meditate; saying that learning kel'noreem could only be a good idea for such an impatient spirit. O'Neill had given it his best shot. He was ready to try almost anything to hang onto his sanity as each hour crawled by without any news of Daniel, but he hadn't turned out to be any too hot at meditation. But perhaps it had worked in one way; as he struggled to try to find the inner tranquility which Bra'tac assured him existed inside every man, he had found himself confiding in the old Jaffa in a way he hadn't done since he was a child. He wasn't quite sure how he'd ended up telling Bra'tac about Sha're, and the two Daniels who had spun him out of his usual groove, but somehow he had. 

"If you no longer love her, you must give your wife her freedom. This woman has given her vow of loyalty to you. She has borne you a child. You owe her the right to know what it is in your heart."

Bisexuality wasn't a big deal on Chulak. Everyone slept with handsome boys, Bra'tac's shrug had seemed to say, but they had nothing to do with one's wife. All warriors slept with their apprentices if their apprentices were comely enough; it was part of what an apprenticeship was about; learning the discipline of submitting to another; earning the right to be a warrior in one's own right; entitled to one's own apprentice. But marriage was sacred. However many boys one slept with, apparently that had nothing to do with the vows one made to one's wife, to show her respect and most importantly to love her best. To sleep with your apprentice on a snowy night on an alien world was just commonsense and one of the perks of office. One's heart still swelled with love and one's loins with desire for the woman who had given birth to one's children. But one did not think of the boy one was training when one climbed into the marriage bed; that was infidelity. O'Neill was therefore being unfaithful in a way that Bra'tac apparently never had. By striving to make the first Daniel love him when he seduced him, even if he had failed, O'Neill had been unfaithful, and for thinking of the second Daniel at the point of death, rather than the wife he had promised to love, O'Neill had revealed himself to be unworthy of the name of husband.

There was no censure in the way Bra'tac told him this. He just spelled out for him truths O'Neill had already known. The marriage was dead. O'Neill had fallen in love with another. Bra'tac clearly thought he was a fool to fall in love with some boy who could never give him sons instead of loving his wife as a good husband should, but as he had done it he must as a man of honor show his wife the respect of freeing her from her obligations to him.

"O'Neill…"

He turned from Bra'tac to find a somewhat breathless Martouf in the stone doorway. For a moment he wondered if Carter and Martouf had been getting it on and wondering what that was like with Khenera and Lantesh watching and possibly imparting helpful advice, then realized Martouf was breathless from running from his quarters to find O'Neill. Fear tightened a round his heart and he rose to his feet as if on strings. "Tell me…?"

"He's alive."

"Teal'c?" Bra'tac stepped forward. "Or the boy?"

Martouf nodded, still catching his breath. "Both the rebel Jaffa and Doctor Jackson are alive and unharmed but Heru'ur is dead. It took some time to unravel events but it seems that Teal'c killed Heru'ur then dressed him in the garb of a dead Jaffa, and he and Daniel Jackson passed from Heru'ur's citadel to the cargo bay where Heru'ur's fleet was in waiting. They stole a tel'tak and were pursued with great ferocity but managed to evade their attackers and also to throw the body of Heru'ur into space where it can never be recovered. They made their escape in a death glider just before crash-landing the tel'tak, making sure it was an old glider they stole which would pass through the rings of the 'gate. They then traveled by Stargate to several addresses to throw off their pursuers. Tok'ra operatives on one of the planets on which they briefly landed saw them and realized they must be the two I had asked them to look out for. They made contact and have just sent me word that Teal'c and Doctor Jackson will be here within a few days."

O'Neill was feeling almost faint with relief. All those days of imagining Daniel dead or a brutalized sex slave of Heru'ur and all the time he'd been running around the galaxy with that Teal'c guy… but he kept that from Martouf. Trying to be as irascible as he usually was. "After Tok'ra Central have questioned them?"

"My people need to reassure themselves that this Teal'c is everything he appears to be and to consult with him about the death of Apophis and Heru'ur. It seems he has a blood feud with Cronos and this is something that also must be discussed. But rest assured, Colonel, your teammate will be returned to you very soon."

"How many days until they arrive?" Bra'tac pressed.

"Five days," Martouf looked as if he expected O'Neill to object to that and O'Neill was on the point of objecting to that, rigorously and loudly, when Bra'tac interrupted with a nod of satisfaction:

"Good. That gives us time."

"Time?" O'Neill looked at the old warrior sideways, feeling that sinking sensation he'd always used to get from teachers and priests.

"To inform your wife of your decision."

Just for a moment O'Neill thought about saying that perhaps Sha're didn't really need to know, did she? And he was really a line of least resistance kind of guy, who never saw the point in telling a lover you were dumping them, when you could just quietly exit from their life and then send them a postcard later to let them know you were gone and oh by the way would they mind mailing you that shirt you must have left in their closet? And it would make her unhappy and she'd cry, and he really hated seeing people being unhappy, which was why he tended to make sure that they didn't find out how unhappy they were about to be until he wasn't around to witness it. Maybe he could write her a letter? A letter would do, wouldn't it?

Bra'tac continued to gaze at him just as sternly as if O'Neill's excuses had been voiced aloud and O'Neill sighed in defeat. It seemed as if much against his better judgment and entirely contrary to his usual way of dealing with women, he was going to have to be honest with not just his wife but his father-in-law and then have to stick around afterwards for the tears and recriminations. His throat caught as he realized that not only was he going to have to look into the eyes of woman who loved him and tell her that he loved another, but he was going to have to tell Katy that he and her mother were never going to live together on Abydos the way he had promised. 

Subdued and resigned now, he nodded to Bra'tac. "Yes. Okay. Abydos then. Will you…?" He'd been a loner for so many years but the Daniels had undone him. He had lost his certainties somewhere in the depths of those blue eyes. Lost his conviction that he was quite as shallow and as contented as he thought he was. He seemed to have some unexpected deeps there and he also seemed to have discovered a need for company, even the company of a Jaffa warrior who disapproved of ninety percent of what he said and did.

Bra'tac nodded his head. "If you wish."

Having received Hammond's permission and having given his instructions to Carter and Kawalsky about what to do in his absence, O'Neill shouldered his pack and headed for the Stargate. As he approached the big stone ring he realized that he was burning all his boats this time without knowing if there was going to be a rescue craft coming into sight any time soon. He was going to tell Sha're he loved Daniel without having any idea if Daniel loved him. Carter might think he did, but then Carter had just agreed to have a snake put in her head so how good was her judgment? The other Daniel hadn't loved him. The other Daniel had known him about as well as it was possible for two people to know one another, but he still hadn't loved him, not like he'd loved the O'Neill in his own dimension. Perhaps he wasn't really worthy of anyone's love, and once he had told Sha're the truth even the possibility of one day retiring to Abydos would be lost to him. He was going to lose everything he had during this trip; his right to be called a hero and a good husband. Perhaps they'd bury the gate and he'd never see his child again. Perhaps Kasuf would kill him for dishonoring his daughter through his infidelity. All he knew was that Bra'tac was right and that he owed Sha're the truth, just as he owed Daniel the respect of making him an offer with no deceptions attached to it. And if he ended up with nothing and no one after this, he supposed it would just serve him right.

***

Swearing savagely, O'Neill ran to the ocean and splashed seawater over his burning arm. Perhaps it wasn't literally on fire but it felt as if it was. He held his arm under the water as the waves rolled in lazily, spraying him with salt and foam, gritting his teeth as the fresh cut burned and burned from the reaction to the plant pulp. Another one to cross off his list of possibles then. Sweat stood out on his forehead as the pain built to a crescendo as the plant pulp reacted to the seawater, and then began to ease as the waves washed it away. A thin wash of blood colored the water around the wound; that was good; that would clean out the cut. Through the rippling distortion of the waves he looked at the other cuts down his left arm, dark scabs in various stages of healing at slanting intervals down the skin. He looked as if he been clawed by a large cat. The swelling had gone down from around the third cut and the allergic reaction to the sweet-scented pollen of those open yellow flowers. And those white blisters around the first cut were just faint red spots now. He had thought it would get harder and harder to do this; a conditioned response to the pain of cutting into one's own skin until the red blood ran freely, compounded by the pain of one's skin blistering, searing and discoloring in reaction to having unknown unnamed leaves, flowers, and mashed bark pulp spread across its raw surface. But every time he stepped into the shelter and saw Daniel lying there, getting thinner and sicker, grayish sweat beading his bone-white skin, those shadows under his eyes getting darker as his cheekbones became more prominent, his ribs and hips more noticeable; every time he took off the bandage from his shoulder and found the wound was still weeping and infected and the fever burning brighter with each passing day, it became no effort at all to cut into his own skin with his knife and slap on another leaf or pulped plant while praying all the while that this time maybe this time it would heal him.

"Jack…" Daniel's throat was so sore he could barely croak his name, but O'Neill seemed to have developed super sensitive hearing where Daniel was concerned. Sometimes, when he was in a different part of the island he would suddenly turn and start running, not truly having heard something, just knowing his name had been said. It was entirely possible also that he was already going a little insane.

"Daniel…" He tried not to burst into the shelter, however high the irrational panic flared, but to move slowly and calmly and use low soothing tones. But occasionally he forgot to do that and erupted into the place like a meteorite shower, trailing terror and confusion. Today was one of those days. "Are you okay?"

"I heard you cry out…" Each word hurt when your throat was as sore as Daniel's was and O'Neill winced at each whispered rasp. 

"Shush, it's okay…"

"Are you hurt? Did something sting you or…?"

"Hush, Daniel." He knelt down next to him, automatically putting a hand to his wet forehead. Burning up, despite the antibiotics; the fever still stoking the fires a little higher each day. When the antibiotics were finished there was going to be nothing left to throw at this infection except prayers. Or perhaps one of the damned plants on this damned island. "I'm fine." Too late he realized he'd forgotten to pull his jacket back on to hide the cuts on his arms.

Daniel squinted at him myopically. "Your arm is bleeding. Did you…?"

O'Neill put a hand across his mouth, saying conversationally, "I've just declared myself president for life of this island and my first rule as president is to make a decree saying that any sick people talking when they've been told not to have to clean out the latrines. Clear enough for you, Jackson?" He removed his hand to let Daniel argue with him, the way he always did.

" 'President for life'?" Despite the whispered croak the sideways look was all too familiar. "You're not going to start holding conversations with balls, are you?"

O'Neill tried to find a smile for him but it was hard not to let the panic show when Daniel looked so much like someone who was…dying. "Why would I when I have you here as a captive audience? Now, why don't I explain the rules of hockey to you one more time. There will be a test later…"

Only when Daniel was safely asleep did O'Neill bow his head, trying to wrestle the panic under control. He couldn't do this. The odds were hopeless and he had no idea what he was doing. He was just randomly grabbing at plants and slapping them on his skin. He could do this for a decade without success and there was only one box of antibiotics left. Perhaps they weren't curing it, but they were at least delaying the inevitable. They were keeping Daniel alive. Keeping him this side of that yawning chasm between the living and the dead. Even if Daniel was sitting there dabbling his toes in the damned Styx and counting his pennies for the ferryman, he was still on the right shore, and at the moment that was all O'Neill wanted, to find some way to keep Daniel on this shore with him. When he looked into the future he saw himself bearded and wild-eyed scratching Daniel's name onto a rock: Daniel Jackson 1965 – 2000. Staring into the abyss of a future of soul-tearing loneliness, talking to the ghost of the man he'd failed to save while the gulls flew overhead, plucking the gray wisps of his scattered sanity from passing clouds and screaming laments for the dead.

He took Daniel's hand and on an impulse put it up to his face, needing the reassurance of that warm skin against his unshaven jaw, the whorls of the skin on his knuckles, the long fingers so familiar to him. He closed his eyes and turned his head to brush the soft skin of the sleeping man's palm with his lips; feeling the warmth and life of that living man's hand against his mouth. He spoke softly so Daniel would only hear him in his feverish dreams: "Don't leave me here by myself, Daniel. Please stay with me. Please stay…"

***

He'd forgotten how beautiful the sunset was on Abydos. After three days of tears and recriminations, of a permanent feeling of sickness in his guts as he looked around at faces on which he'd seen only liking and approval in the past and now saw only hurt and disappointment, it was good to see something as uncomplicated as a setting sun. 

He wondered if it spoiled it for Carter, knowing the astrophysics. Knowing that the sun wasn't really sinking behind the rim of the planet, it was just the way the world turned. If it made it even better for Daniel because he would know every myth in the universe which explained why it was that night followed day, darkness followed light. All those creation myths and snakes swallowing the world. He just accepted it at face value: something beautiful and ephemeral that made him glad to be alive even as it reminded him how short his time upon the world would be.

"You should drink this. It will warm you."

He turned to find Sha're proffering a bowl of something hot. She had washed her face since he'd last seen her, wiped away the tear tracks carefully, rebound her hair, changed her clothes. There was a resignation about her, and a return of that sweetness which he remembered being so taken by on their first meeting. How hesitant she'd been, how modest, and submissive on the surface, yet with that fire beneath. Her beauty still caught at his throat; like the sunset; like the sea. "I'm sorry," he said hoarsely, meaning it with every fiber of his being. "I'm sorry I wasn't what you thought I was. What you wanted me to be. What I wish I could have been for you."

Although there were tears in her eyes again at once, emotions too near the surface to control or conceal, she did find a wry smile. "I wish you could have been that too." She reached out and took his hand in hers, squeezing it gently, before turning to look, not at him, but at the setting sun. "But do you remember when you freed us from Ra, you told us that we had to learn to find ourselves? To be who we were and not what someone pretending to be a god told us to be. I have thought of that often since. I have thought that I have not done as you said."

He looked at her in confusion. "What do you mean, Sha're?" And with the sun gilding her heavy dark hair, the honey tone of her skin, he remembered why he had been more than half in love with her once. Although the feeling had faded with absence and temptation, in the past she hadn't been such a fool to have imagined the look in his eyes was love.

She kept gazing at the sunset, a slight smile playing on her lips, sadness and resolution on her face. "I have continued to be what my father wished me to be. What I thought a good wife, a good daughter, a good mother should be. I have not found myself. I have not even looked for myself."

"And you think I have?" He put down the bowl, took her hand, put it to his lips and kissed it. He'd forgotten her courage. How could he have forgotten her courage? She had gone into battle for him. Picked up a gun and fired it at what she had believed was the servant of a god for his sake. "I have no idea who I am. I never have had. I just know that I love…"

"Love someone who is not me…?" She faced the truth in the same way Skaara had described her facing the news of his death; with tears in her eyes but her head held high. 

He put his arms around her then and held her close, kissing the top of her head. "I think we could have been friends. I think we could have liked each other so much more than we ever can now if only I hadn't…"

He felt her tears wetting his t-shirt. She gave a little half-laugh through the tears. "I was the one who took off my clothes and offered myself to you, Jonathan."

He closed his eyes, remembering that moment; how sweet and how beautiful she had been, and how his body had responded even as his mind told him that a better man than him would lift the dress back up and tell her she didn't have to do this; that women weren't chattels to be traded like mirrors and trinkets; that he couldn't accept what she was offering. Except he hadn't done what a better man would have done and he'd woken in the morning, a little drunk and a little disgusted with himself for stealing the virginity of another innocent who'd trusted him, to find that this time justice had at least caught up with him by deciding he would have to marry the girl he might have gotten pregnant. That there was no back window he could climb out of to escape her father on an alien world.

"I never deserved you." His breath caught in his throat as he remembered the way the other Daniel had looked at her photograph with such longing, such sadness, and then with that little smile of memory, finding comfort in the thought that she was alive somewhere even if it wasn't in his universe. Starting to give O'Neill messages to give to her and then realizing that in this world he was meaningless to her; just some stranger from a different dimension who had seduced her husband away from her.

He hadn't intended to start down that road but he found the words spilling out then, telling her about the quantum mirror and the other Daniel, the other Sha're. How much they'd loved one another. Her possession by Amaunet. Her child fathered by Apophis. Her courage in trying to communicate to Daniel where the child was with her final gasp. Her death. His mourning. The look in those blue eyes when he said her name. 

He was breathless when he finished, having to gasp around the memory of Daniel's sorrow, the weight of his loss. So damaged and so fragile compared with the Daniel he had come to love; walking wounded full of unfathomable silences, unexpected mood swings. Brittle and heart-bruised and yet still doggedly convinced that there was good out there somewhere, in the next people they met, the next race they encountered. Trying to work through feelings that were unnatural to him; trying to free himself from his hatred of Apophis before it changed him into someone else. His own Daniel was still invulnerable through innocence; arrogant with the sweet certainties of youth; maddeningly stubborn when it came to archaeology yet heartbreakingly insecure when it came to his own worth; believing everyone was worthy of love except himself. In that he was like the other Daniel; the rejected orphans no one had loved after their parents' deaths, not even their own kith and kin.

"Jonathan…"

He blinked and found she was gazing at his face with wonder, wiping a tear from under his eye and then carefully tasting the salt from her fingertip. She looked at him for a long moment and then stroked his hair back from his eyes, just as she had done when they were married, that confidence of possession which had made her blossom before his eyes; except now it was the action of a sister with a troublesome twin. "We must find a way to be friends. We must start again. We have a daughter who needs us to be friends."

"I want someone to love you the way Daniel loved you in his dimension." Her eyes were so beautiful a man could drown in them. Ironically, he thought this was the closest he had ever come to being head over heels in love with this woman; in wanting to worship the curve of her instep and kiss her bare toes; to adore her and revere her and feel his heart turn cartwheels when she walked into a room. He'd had to lose her to realize just how much he was losing. It was fitting. It satisfied his sense of justice. He was glad she was proving so damned hard to give up. She'd been ten hours in labor with no pain relief and no husband there to hold her hand to give birth to their child. He damned well should feel like he'd just lost a lung as he realized he was never going to have her look at him as if he was her whole world again. _I want to suffer_ , he thought. _I want to be sick with jealousy the next time I see you because the next time I see you I want you to be looking at another man the way you used to look at me._

"I need to find who I am," she said gently. "Otherwise I will just be like a…fishing boat." She made a motion with her right hand of something swinging from side to side. "At the whim of the tides and the winds."

He smiled at her, remembering they'd used to share a lot of jokes. In between his restless moments as he searched for convincing excuses as to why he needed to leave a day earlier than he'd originally promised; the caged tiger pacing starting up in him again at the strain of being in a place where he had to pretend to be married and faithful and all manner of other things he'd never thought he wanted to be. In between those times of boredom and guilt there had been humor too. "Tossing helplessly on the turbulent seas of love…?"

She snorted and then laughed, a belly laugh that reminded him of the panther she could be in bed sometimes. "I read those novels you leave for me. They are very foolish."

"That's because they're really written by men," he told her. "Hildebrand Offlinger of the ripped bodices and purple prose is really some dull little guy called Melvin living in New York and daydreaming of lerve."

"Well, I have read them all and I think those people did not know who they were yet. They are escaping into love to not to have to see themselves in the mirror." She loved the mirror he'd given her, fascinated by it, wanting Katy to see herself, to understand the concept of one's own reflection. She looked back at the sunset, head on one side. "I think you are an escape for me, Jonathan. I think you are a…symbol. Like the ones Ra stole from us." She drew the sign for earth in the sand then wiped it out a little regretfully. "In losing you I have lost everything I thought I wanted, and so I am full of sorrow and I weep. But the truth is how can I know what I want if I don't know who I am?"

He gazed at her, wondering if this new stature of hers was something he had just never noticed until now, or if this was a gift from Daniel, by taking O'Neill away from her, he had given her the space to find a strength she'd never known she had. He said, "I don't know the answer to that."

She smiled then and reached across to touch him gently on the nose with her forefinger, as if he were a child or a dog, saying gently, "There is no answer to that. There is only 'goodbye'. And then we shake hands, like friends do. And then you leave. And the next time you come to Abydos, we meet as the parents of Ka'ta'nefer; people who were once lovers, and are now friends."

And it hurt. It really hurt to hear her say it. Hurt fittingly, the way a bullet from a just duel might do. She had always taken him at his word. Never argued with him. This time the squall of tears and recriminations had blown itself into a quiet gust of resignation within three days. Perhaps he'd hoped she might argue with him a little longer. Perhaps he'd hoped she might ask for more time and the door left propped open. But it was closed now. No way back to who either of them had been before. She had moved on just as he had done. In her heart she must still think of him as someone who told the truth, and he suddenly realized she was right. He had told her that he loved another, and although she had called him cruel and fickle and faithless, she had not called him a liar, and she had been just there. He _had_ told her the truth this time and she must have read it in his eyes, and perhaps in reading truth there realized how many of his past words had been skittered across the thin ice of deception. He loved Daniel in a way that he had never loved her, but perhaps he loved her now in a way that he had only loved Daniel before, seeing some of the same strength in her, the same courage, the same compassion for him, the same willingness to take the right road however difficult it might look. In that other universe they must have been so beautiful together; Sha're and Daniel. He wondered if Apophis had any conception of the enormity of the crime he had committed in ripping two such rare spirits apart. In making it so easy for him to leave, she had made it harder than he had ever imagined. That felt right to him too. He rose to his feet and then bent to kiss her brow. "Goodbye."

She pulled him down and kissed his mouth, once, gently, for the last time. "Goodbye, Jonathan, my friend."

As he backed away, he kept looking at her, sitting on her feet on the sand watching the sun go down. The lump in his throat, surprised him, he felt very alone. His voice sounded hoarse as he asked her, "What will you tell Katy about her father now?"

She turned to look at him and there was a curious peace about her he had never seen before. "I have never told her anything but the truth."

"I think you may have lied a little, Sha're." He managed a smile but the tears felt very near. "I think we both know that now."

"No." She shook her head and her dark hair rippled in the fading light. "I told our daughter that her father was brave, and good, and kind, and a great warrior. All those things were true then and are true now. But now I can also tell her that her father is an honest man. I never told her that before."

His 'thank you' was so muffled he wasn't sure if she heard it, but he thought she would know he was grateful all the same. It seemed she had always known a lot more than he had ever understood. As he turned and walked back to the Stargate he realized he was crying, and he was free. He was free to love Daniel without deceit or deception. He was also, for the first time in a long time, utterly alone.

***

O'Neill turned it around slowly in his fingers as if it was the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen. The last shot of penicillin. The last thing he had to throw at the infection fighting for mastery of Daniel's system before the alien gloop won, Daniel was lost to him forever, and he was stranded alone in hell. And yet he would have continued to call it a kind of Paradise if Daniel had been well. The sea and the sky and the blue of the lagoon with the gulls skimming over the surface; the way the palm trees dipped and swayed to the rhythm of the wind; the eye-dazzling brilliance of the parrot plumage, the soft golden gleam of monkey fur, curious eyes watching him from the high branches, small troupes following him from a safe distance out of simple fascination. The mountain in the center of the island that sloped up to that curiously flat plateau. The diamond patterned snakes and brilliant green lizards that would warily observe him from low branches within the cobalt shadows and actinic shafts of sunlight that found their way beneath the jungle canopy. And in the valley bottom at the base of the mountain, the half-buried ruins of some long lost people who had come in peace, or war, or hope, or simple desperation, flourished for a while and then faded, leaving only their stone homage to some forgotten god on this forgotten island. A place of myth and magic, puzzles and plenty. Enough to occupy even a mind as curious as Daniel's and to sustain a body even as hungry for variety as his own, if only they had arrived here well and whole, instead of damaged and dying.

 

The shelter seemed so dark after the dazzling sunlight outside. A cramped place smelling too strongly of freshly cut vegetation, fever sweat, urine, and fish guts. As he opened his mouth to tell Daniel about the temple, he saw that he was sleeping. Not peacefully; feverish sweating and shivering under the space blanket, talking nonsense in his tangled dreams; but perhaps it was rest of a kind and he didn't like to disturb him. He knew he should go back outside and work on the shelter but he had mentally reserved this hour as time he was going to spend with Daniel, and now he was looking at him all he could think about was how much losing him was going to hurt. He sat beside him and wrapped his arms around his knees, resisting the urge to rock only with an effort. He spent every hour of every day working to make it possible for them to live here and every minute of those hours fighting the panic at how fucking useless he was turning out to be. Because none of it meant anything; the careful way he was thatching their new shelter with those wide green leaves he'd found; the extra lashings he'd used to ensure the bamboo cane was secure; all that meticulous food gathering and tasting; what did any of it signify if the one thing that really mattered he couldn't do? What did anything matter if he couldn't save Daniel's life?

Looking down at his sleeping friend now, he saw that Daniel had a grayish pallor to his skin that seemed all wrong given the beautiful weather outside. He looked thinner again. Each day O'Neill swore there was a little less of him. He thought about waking him up to try to coax him into eating some more food, and then thought about how much Daniel needed his rest and decided to give him the last antibiotic injection instead. It was getting harder to find a vein, all those bruises in the crook of Daniel's arms, the soft skin blue and yellow around red puncture wounds that refused to entirely heal. At least that wasn't going to be a problem from now on.

As O'Neill withdrew the needle he knew this shot wasn't going to be enough. The penicillin was slowing the infection, maybe, but it hadn't killed it. Tomorrow the bacteria was still going to be there in Daniel's bloodstream, and Daniel's immune system was going to be so weakened from the tetracycline that the infection would overwhelm him. His temperature would go through the roof, and he would die. Unless O'Neill could find some way to cure the infection and neutralize the effect of the deadly green venom spewed with such calculated spite from that alien projectile.

"Jack…" Daniel opened his eyes, wincing from the slant of sunlight that had found its way into the leafy gloom with them. He reached out to him and O'Neill flinched at how fine his wrist bone looked, at the dark smudges of shadow under eyes that looked too large for his face. How could it be happening right in front of him? How could Daniel be wasting away when he spent so much of his time spooning food and liquid past his dry lips and down his sore throat?

"I'm right here." He knew there had to be times when Daniel woke up when he wasn't here. When Daniel stumbled out of his feverish dreams into feverish consciousness and found himself alone and bewildered in a place he didn't recognize. The thought of it tore through him, but there was so much to do and only one of him, and if there was going to be a way to save Daniel he doubted he was going to find it in this shelter. He took his hand, squeezing it gently. "Right here, Danny."

The relief in Daniel's blue eyes made a fist tighten around his heart; as did that impossibly sweet smile. That was the real Daniel, the one with no defenses, no concealments; so glad to see him; so relieved to wake and find O'Neill sitting next to him. Then Daniel winced and looked at his arm, a teardrop of blood still oozing from the hole the needle had left. He turned his head to look at the empty syringe, the last of its milky salvation only a smear upon the glass; like whitewash on an abandoned store window. Then he gazed up at O'Neill, blue eyes full of compassion. He didn't ask if that was the last one. They had both counted them enough times; didn't make O'Neill spell it out for him. He just said gently, "You look tired, Jack."

A lucid waking this time. Those were becoming more and more precious to him. Once the effects of this last shot wore off he presumed there would be less of those and more of the wild-eyed stranger who flinched away from him as he if he was afraid O'Neill was going to hit him, and asked him incomprehensible questions in any language but English. O'Neill forced a smile. "So do you."

Daniel looked at him for a long moment, as if he was trying to memorize his face. His expression was very gentle, full of compassion for him, and O'Neill swallowed, knowing where the conversation was about to go. Daniel was about to grant him absolution for not being able to save him, except they were _not_ going to have that conversation. As Daniel opened his mouth, he jumped in first, a garbled description of the monkeys that had followed him that morning, trying too hard to make it funny, using two fingers to show imaginary monkeys creeping after an imaginary O'Neill across Daniel's blanket-covered abdomen.

Daniel laughed, perhaps genuinely amused despite the poor telling, so weak from his fever he was ready to be entertained by anything, then winced. O'Neill recognized the signs. "Do you need to pee?"

Daniel averted his eyes. "I hate your having to…"

"Daniel, your kidneys are in a little trouble right now so the more you pee the better. It was probably caused by the blood loss so as we solved that, they should start to recover as long as we treat them well. But we need to flush out the infection any way we can. Like I keep telling you, if I'm not here and you need to go, you go. I can make you another bed in an hour or so if this one gets wet or dirty but we didn't pack a dialysis machine." O'Neill noticed the way he had slipped into using that Janet Fraiser speak 'we' as if Daniel was also in on the healing process rather than someone just being told to drink what he was given and not argue about it. Also the way he was faking a knowledge he didn't really have so that the patient would feel that at least someone knew what he was doing. The benevolent tyranny of physicians was making a lot more sense to him now that he was the one left in sole charge of a patient.

Daniel was too weak to walk, so he carried him outside again, wrapped in the space blanket for the sake of his modesty, and then lowered him gently onto his bare feet. He helped him lean against a coconut palm, holding him up and keeping the space blanket out of the way while they both waited for the pressing pain on Daniel's bladder to turn into the tinkle of virulent orange piss. Today there was blood in it and O'Neill closed his eyes at the crimson evidence that Daniel's internal organs were starting to break down under the strain. He didn't have any problem with feeding him, washing him, seeing to any of the intimate duties necessary to keep this patient clean and dry and eating and drinking, even though Daniel squirmed about in embarrassment the whole time and would never meet his eye. He liked having something concrete to do that he actually _could_ do that made things better for his patient; it was the helplessness he hated. All he cared about was that Daniel didn't die; but with each passing day that felt like a more and more remote possibility. His arm was still stinging from that morning's failure. He had borrowed Daniel's notebook to keep a record of his attempts, a dried leaf or scrape of bark or flower pressed into the following page for quick recognition. In an hour or so he'd try the leaves of the tree the snake was always wrapped around; dare its flickering tongue and orange eyes to snatch a handful of flowers, a leaf or three, a strip of fibrous bark. But for the moment he would concentrate on Daniel, trying to enjoy this time while ignoring the panic that every second spent with him was a second when he wasn't trying to find a cure. Just as he fought to ignore the panic when trying to find a cure for him, that every second was a waste of time they could have spent together…

He carried him to the sea afterwards, sitting him on the beach so he could splash salt water over him to wash away the sweat and grime and acid sting of urine from his feverish body. And besides, they were stranded in a tropical paradise; Daniel ought to get to see the sea. O'Neill pushed his forage cap onto Daniel's head to keep off the sun and let him soak up some rays. Daniel was always cold, so it would be a rare pleasure for him to feel the sunlight warming his body. O'Neill was just so afraid of him getting sunstroke or dehydration; falling asleep and getting burned, or the heat of the day frying his brains, that he didn't like to risk this too often, imagining the sun sucking from his fragile patient another hour of life. He leant Daniel against a coconut palm that had shed all its nuts so there was no danger of him being concussed and let him enjoy just watching the ocean rolling in on a gullsong symphony of green and blue. After a little while, Daniel closed his eyes and slept, lulled to sleep by the sound of the waves. Perhaps it was a waste of that hour of lucidity the antibiotics would give him. Perhaps this was the last time they would ever sit on a beach together and watch the waves rolling in. Or perhaps this was the last dreamless sleep Daniel would ever enjoy. Either way he let him sleep until the sweat was beading his brow again, the infection the antibiotics had warded off so briefly rolling back over those fragile spores of penicillin like the tank division of a particularly merciless advancing army.

Daniel woke as the wind was getting up; the way it did sometimes here, torn clouds skimming across the sky. His eyes watered from how bright everything was and when O'Neill put a hand on his forehead it was hotter than ever; the fever back with a vengeance. O'Neill tried to find a smile for him as he crouched down in front of him on his haunches. "No bucket and spade so you can't make any sandcastles."

Daniel smiled at him; a kind of wistful faraway smile that made O'Neill feel hollow inside. Daniel looked the way people with terminal illnesses and no hope of recovery looked. Gazing at the sea as if it was the most beautiful thing in the world, blinking tears from his eyes at the blueness of the sky, the cry of the gulls. Everything so precious because this might be the last time he ever saw it, heard it, smelt it. O'Neill couldn't keep the begging look from his eyes. "You've gotta fight it, Danny. I can beat this but you have to give me more time. You have to hang in there for me."

Daniel looked so sorry for him, and a little guilt-racked too, clearly not thinking he was going to be able to make it; looking around the beach and worrying about O'Neill being left here alone. He said gently, "I don't want to die, Jack, but sometimes it just happens and it's nobody's fault. You have to promise me that you – "

"No." He pulled the space blanket around him more warmly, aware that despite the sunshine, there was a breeze coming in from the sea. "I can't promise that."

"They'll find you. Somehow I know Sam and Teal'c will…"

"They'll find both of us." He was suddenly more certain of that than he'd ever been sure of anything, holding Daniel's gaze. "Or else they'll find neither of us." 

Daniel winced. "Jack, we both know that was the last of the…"

He interrupted firmly. "You have to hold on. I know it's going to get a little rough for a few days, but you have to promise me you're going to hang in there. Don't bail on me now." As Daniel still looked so sorry for him and so frail, he gritted his teeth. "Daniel… We've been through so much together. We have to get through this too."

Daniel shivered, another wave of coldness coursing through him. O'Neill could practically see the germs hitching a ride on each flow through his veins, a slow poisoning of alien infection. 

"Promise me."

Daniel shot him a look full of reproach and affection; pleading with him mutely not to ask him to give his word when they both knew he would only end up breaking it. "I'll do my best."

O'Neill realized Daniel wasn't the only one with tears in his eyes. He pulled the blanket around him more tightly as Daniel shivered again, trying to find a smile and a light tone. "Hey, Doctor Jackson, your best has always been good enough for me." Then as Daniel winced from another shuddering wave of fever, he put his arms around him and held him, rubbing his back gently to try to warm him, feeling Daniel flinch from even that gentle pressure, skin burning, veins running with ice. All the antibiotics were doing now was pissing off the infection, like a gadfly stinging an elephant, and each time it came back, it returned with redoubled spite. Now there would be nothing to hold it. He tightened his grip, closing his eyes and trying not to sob or to rock him in his arms but thinking all the same of all the time they'd wasted; all those stupid arguments and pointless silences and for what reason; what had any of it mattered when they had both known what it was to lose someone they loved, and should have known, better than anyone, how precious every moment with a friend should be. O'Neill rocked him gently then, comforting himself with the motion. Daniel gave a little sigh and laid his head on O'Neill's shoulder, closing his eyes and letting his body go limp against his, as if there had never been any doubt that O'Neill's was the only comfort he had ever wanted or needed. As if there had never been any doubt that O'Neill was the person he loved most in all the world.

***


	3. On the Island

>   
>  So dear I love him, that with him all deaths  
>  I could endure, without him live no life.  
>  John Milton Paradise Lost (bk. IX, l. 832)  
> 

### 3\. On the Island

"Samantha…?"

Carter looked up from the computer screen to find Narim gazing at her the way people all gazed at her now: as if she was a mental patient who needed to be approached with care. As with Teal'c, General Hammond, Janet Fraiser and her father, there was a lot of compassion there too. The expression of people who had accepted the truth and were waiting for her to come and join them in their version of reality. Teal'c had been the last one to accept it but when she had seen that look in his eyes too she had known she was on her own in more ways than one. Known that she had just lost half of the family known as SG-1. Except she wasn't prepared to accept that version of reality, any more than Daniel had when it had been her and Colonel O'Neill trapped in Antarctica. 

She looked back at the screen, shoulders rigid with denial. The answer had to lie here somewhere; in the symmetry of arithmetic, the unalterable truth of astrophysical calculations. Like Format's Theorem; like Einstein's Theory of Relativity; the answer must be in the numbers somewhere; she just had to grasp the calculation.

Narim put his hand on hers, saying gently: "You should rest." With his free hand he placed a steaming glass of something purple on the glass table in front of her. She remembered sipping the same strength-reviving liquid when they had been searching for Daniel the last time. The same sense of futility creeping through her then as she realized that she was being asked to achieve the impossible once again and that perhaps this time she couldn't do it.

She took a sip of the liquid, grateful for the heat and flavor, even more grateful for the burst of energy she got from it. It reminded her of student days, throwing back the caffeine to finish yet another paper. At the same time she had been struggling with astrophysical equations, Daniel must have been working on yet another archaeological paper; grappling with hieroglyphs or cuneiform while she tried to memorize the arcana of quantum theory. 

"There's no time." She looked up at Narim, so patient and so handsome it always surprised her each time she saw him; Narim always taller than she expected, always even more attractive than she allowed herself to remember him. She saw her dual reflection in his eyes; hollow-eyed, hair uncombed, the pain from her broken arm and the strain of too many sleepless nights leaving smudged shadows under her eyes. So she looked like crap. So what. The last time she'd seen Daniel he hadn't been looking too great either… At the memory of him so dazed with pain, so obviously dying, she felt another fugitive sob try to rise up in her throat. The liquid screen blurred briefly, then she gritted her teeth and put her fingers back on the keyboard, entered some more calculations. "There must have been a finite amount of energy produced by those weapons. The energy of the wormhole magnified by the energy of the weapons used to…"

"Samantha." Narim took her hand from the keyboard and held it as he sat down next to her. Still keeping hold of her hand, he said gently, "We don't know how much energy was put out by the weapons of that alien culture. We only have one piece of data upon which to base all our calculations and that piece of data tells us the stream should have split and sent Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson to the other Earth Stargate, which it did not."

She pulled her hand away, turning back to the keyboard. "I can't give up on them. They'll be relying on me to find them."

Narim sighed. "You have a saying on your world about 'needles in haystacks'…?"

"There must be a way to find them!" She knew she looked wild-eyed and borderline crazy. She could hear that shrill crack in her voice. She could feel the tears coming too. A salt burn behind her eyes.

"Your father thinks you should mourn them. That you should allow General Hammond to mark their passing with some kind of ceremony…"

"My father's wrong!"

They had held a wake for Daniel once already when he had been alive and effectively abandoned by them. They'd left him behind and that realization had haunted her for a long time afterwards. He could have been Nem's prisoner forever, wondering why they had never come back for him while an alien creature ran a current through his brain in a desperate search for any truths that might be lingering there. Then they'd done it again on Klorel's ship. Written him off as dead when he'd still been dying; suffering, bleeding… She remembered him the way he'd been the last time she'd seen him, with the blood on his clothes, his smoking shoulder and thigh, the shock in his eyes at how much pain he was in, how badly he was hurt…

She had argued angrily with Jacob. He had told her there was nothing of the scientist left in what she was doing; she was just someone in denial clutching at straws to ward off the inevitable day when she would have to admit her friends were gone. Had they been sent to a world where the people were friendly and the 'gate was intact they would have been back by now. They had a GDO with them. Readings from the SGC had suggested that what had been done to the 'gate at their end – that total power blow out it had taken Siler the best part of a week to fix – would have happened to whichever 'gate Colonel O'Neill and Daniel had been sent to. If the people on that world – even supposing there were people on that world – didn't have the technology to mend their own 'gate what were the chances they had the medical know-how to save someone who had been in what sounded like critical condition?

Wiping away the tears she had snarled that Daniel was tough. Daniel could take being mortally wounded three times before breakfast and still come back for more. The Tok'ra were so arrogant about their naquadah-based technology perhaps they'd forgotten how many cultures there were out there that knew things about medicine other races could only wonder at. Look at the Nox. Where had been the logic in what they could do? They'd brought them all back from the dead apparently just by wishing for it. Look at Oma Desala. She had fried death gliders in the sky by the force of her will alone. Daniel and the colonel could have gone to a place where there was better medical treatment than the Tau'ri __or__ the Tok'ra could even dream of. 

She was dreaming in mathematical equations on the rare occasions when she slept. Murmuring them when waking like a prayer for the dead. The energy of the wormhole plus the energy of the calculated output of the weapons of the last time the stream had split, taking into account the gravitational pull of every planet between earth and PZ4-901, allowing for solar flares of course and…

Jacob had slammed his hand down on the keyboard and told her this wasn't mathematics. It was fiction. She might as well factor in the offset ratio of a ham sandwich because the truth was they didn't know how much energy had been exerted on the wormhole, they didn't know when or how the stream had split, and they didn't know where O'Neill and Daniel were, and she could add, subtract, multiply, and divide until the cows came home, it would still all be guesswork. And in the meantime look at her, look at what she was turning into, look at what she had become. She had to let go. She had to move on. She owed them a period of mourning; and all these calculations were so much denial of a truth she knew to be unavoidable. They were gone, and it was a terrible tragedy, and he felt for her, he really did. He missed them too… His voice had caught then and no one who wasn't intent on doing so could have imagined he didn't care. There was the kind of bleakness in his eyes that told of a man who had lost, if not his own sons, certainly godsons or nephews. Even in the midst of her resentment of his unwanted advice, she remembered the way he could never be angry with Daniel; always treating him like a wayward stepson wished upon him late in life who, however exasperating he might be on occasion, was too lovable to scold. When she'd been turning the dials of the quantum mirror the last time she'd found herself wondering if in another universe her parents had adopted Daniel, if there was a photograph on a mantelpiece somewhere of Jacob in his uniform resignedly holding the hand of a blond haired boy and a blond haired girl on a trip to a museum to look at an Egyptology exhibition. She'd even wondered if her brother would have been kind to Daniel, or if he would have resented him as yet another barrier between his father and himself…

She'd been jolted back to reality by Jacob saying her name in anxious exasperation. Telling her she was the SGC's most able scientist when it came to the Stargate and all she was doing right now was typing in gibberish day after day in a desperate attempt to avoid confronting the fact that two of her closest friends were lost, probably forever. Hammond wasn't telling her this because Hammond was too kind hearted but he was her father and it was her job to tell her she was losing it, Sam, she was losing it, when there were living people who needed her, and a galaxy still out there, still enslaved by the Goa'uld.

She had said a lot of unforgivable things about how he was more Selmac than Jacob now. How he'd lost the ability to feel. How he'd always cared more about not showing emotion than letting people know they meant something to him. How perhaps he'd been a Tok'ra too long to remember how it felt to lose human beings that you loved. She'd hurt him and he'd left. Ironically, if he came back it would probably be because Selmac talked him round. Selmac didn't have the quick-flaring Carter temper she tried so hard not to have inherited. But for the moment Hammond had given her one last chance to come up with a logical theorem by which Colonel O'Neill and Daniel could be traced, and the Tollan had offered her the chance to use their technology to search for them. Or rather Narim had offered it and had fiercely argued against any objections. Omac had backed him in the curia meeting, reminding the Tollan what they owed SG-1, and perhaps, for all his apparent dispassionate sense of justice, there was a very human concern there also, for the young man who had risked his own liberty to try to save them from captivity and who had won over Omac despite himself.

If it had been people Daniel needed to convince that he should live, she would have been less worried about him. He had proven over and over again that he could turn an enemy into a friend within twenty-four hours. But ripped tissue and severed veins couldn't be reasoned with; only treated and healed. The colonel would do everything humanly possible, she knew that. Risk anything. Sacrifice anything. No one put more stock in loyalty and friendship than he did, and Daniel had always been…special to him; more special perhaps than he'd ever wanted to acknowledge. So if there was anything that could be done, Colonel O'Neill would do it – within the limits of his knowledge. But he wasn't a doctor and he wasn't a 'gate technician. He would do everything he could to keep Daniel alive, she knew that. But he would still need the help of someone with more knowledge than him to get Daniel home. That was her job. That was what Daniel and the Colonel would be expecting her to do. Waiting for her to do. And she was failing them.

"I should have done as Colonel O'Neill requested." Still holding her hand, Narim spoke with quiet regret.

Carter focused on him properly. "What did he request?"

"The use of our implant technology." Narim sighed. "I told him of the way our biorhythms are monitored by central computer so that in case of any injury medical assistance can reach us in minutes. I thought that he would be most disdainful of this intrusion into personal privacy but in fact he showed a great deal of interest. He even asked if he could have examples for the SGC."

"Why?"

"So that if any of his team were lost or injured they could be located with least possible delay. He said you had all contributed considerably to the graying of his hair and he would like to find a solution to the problem."

"But you turned him down?"

Narim nodded, sadly. "I…mistook his motives. I thought that he was trying to encroach upon the privacy of his teammates. I thought perhaps, subconsciously, he was trying inhibit your actions. The fact that both your Doctor Fraiser and the Tok'ra had also turned down his request made me feel that my judgment was sound."

"Was it after Daniel came back from that other universe?" Carter was feeling sick at the thought of how they could have had the solution right there in her hands.

"Yes. I thought his response was…irrational and prompted by…" Narim paused then. 

"Jealousy?" Carter asked quietly.

Narim winced. "I am aware of the regulations regarding inter-personal relationships for those of the same gender within your military organizations. I would not like to suggest anything that might, in your culture, be seen as a criticism of Colonel O'Neill. Whatever his motives may have been, I am now wishing that I had acceded to his request."

"So am I." She put a hand up to her head. "Do you think what I'm doing is pointless? Do you think I'm just trying to put off the evil day when I have to admit that they're gone?"

He had always been a kind man. She was reminded of that whenever she spent time with him. How considerate he was. How sensitive to the feelings of others. He had always asked so little of her that there was a danger she might take him for granted, but now she found that he was providing more comfort with his quiet support than anyone else had done. "Do you want the truth?"

She opened her eyes, weariness sending an ache up her spine to her shoulders. "Yes. I do."

He looked into her eyes as he spoke and she saw how much sorrow there was in them at being the bearer of bad news. "Then I think that there is no theorem that anyone on your world or on mine will be able to devise to tell us to which world Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson were sent when the wormhole to your world was diverted. Without additional data I think you are wasting your time in a futile exercise that serves no purpose and will never lead to their recovery. I am sorry, Samantha."

Although the words hurt, they sounded like the truth this time, whereas from others they had sounded only like things she didn't want to hear. She wondered how she would have felt if Martouf had told her what Narim had just done; if she would have railed at him as she had done at her father and blamed the symbiote inside him for making him so cold. "Thank you," she said, after a short pause. "I value your honesty."

He moistened his lips. "As we're in the mood to answer difficult question, would you be so good as to answer one of mine?"

She was still feeling the numbness creeping through her as she realized that they were really gone. That the reality waiting for her when she returned to the SGC was a world and a life in which Colonel O'Neill and Daniel no longer played part. "Of course."

"You told me once that you needed to know whose feelings you were feeling. Your own or those of the Tok'ra symbiote who once blended with you. Did you ever find out?"

She remembered the weight of Martouf in her arms, the blood trickling from his chest, the warmth draining from him. "Yes."

"Were they…?"

"They were my feelings." She closed her eyes. "But I didn't know that until he died. Which would be anyone's dictionary definition of 'too late'."

"I'm sorry." He tightened his grip on her hand, distress in his eyes. "For you, I mean…" The flicker of a self-deprecating smile. "And perhaps a little for myself."

When she looked up at him she had a sudden memory of how he had felt for her, all those years ago, when he had been courageous enough to share it with her. She suspected he had sensed how vulnerable she had been back then, so eager to prove herself, afraid to ever let the mask slip and the human being show through, suspecting that Daniel's enthusiasm and curiosity which was so endearing in a civilian would seem only incompetent and unfocused coming from a soldier such as herself. After all, a soldier and a scientist was what and who she was; both of which roles suggested competence; rationality; level-headed commonsense. Occasionally the human being got buried. Occasionally the human being was all too painfully exposed. Her relationships had become an area of embarrassment to her; hero-worshipping crushes; poor judgment choices; complicated entanglements involving too many people in the same crowded heads, too much space in vulnerable hearts already occupied by memories of the dead. 

The embryonic 'romance' with Narim had been the most uncomplicated relationship she had ever known. A courtship in the SGC based on mutual respect and mutual interest; cerebral and affectionate. She had let Jonas Hanson do things to her in bed in the heat of their passion she'd afterwards regretted; drawn to the man and his unshakeable certainties like iron filings to a magnet. But she had given her cat to Narim. Perhaps only a woman would understand what that meant. She was certainly never sure if Narim had fully grasped how much he had meant to her for her to entrust him with a living, breathing creature that trusted her. He had shown his heart to her, without expecting anything in return, the way one gave a present to another, in the hope that it might mean something, be a comfort or a consolation on darker days. And it had meant far more than she had ever wanted him to know. She spent her days with three handsome men who hardly seemed to notice she was female, and she would have resented it if they had done; didn't want Colonel O'Neill to hold open doors for her, for Daniel to blush when she said his name, for Teal'c to be uncomfortable in her presence. But it might have been nice if they hadn't all looked so surprised any time some man wanted to date her. Daniel always got that confused look when he found her talking to a guy for reasons non-military or non-scientific, as if he'd found General Hammond wearing pantyhose. Whatever 'Sam' meant to him, it clearly wasn't 'eligible female'. Sister, probably, friend, twin, soulmate, but not someone you dated; someone he had gaped at in total confusion the first time he had seen her in a dress. When a man made nice to her in front of the colonel, O'Neill just looked as if the guy must be nuts. Perhaps he thought women were only women if they were wearing dresses. She remembered his eyes straying cleavage-wise to Anise on pretty much the first meeting. And he hadn't put up much of a fight for his virtue once Kinthia had done the dance of the seven veils in front of him… She realized she was still a little angry with him about that, did get a little resentful when he made eyes at other women, although she liked to tell herself it was partly embarrassment because he did the thing so awkwardly. Perhaps she took them and their affection for her for granted just as much as they took her and her single status for granted too. The four of them some weird gestalt entity that felt lessened if any of them showed an interest in anyone outside the magic unit. She remembered O'Neill and Teal'c's hostility towards Ke'ra and realized she and Janet hadn't been very much more friendly towards the woman. Daniel and O'Neill looking utterly bewildered by the realization that Teal'c and Shau'nac were more than just friends, as if it had never occurred to them until that instant that Teal'c might have a sex-life. Daniel being as mature as a schoolboy once he'd noticed that Simmons had a crush on her. Teal'c rarely annoyed her but some days with Daniel and the Colonel it was like having a couple of brothers she really wanted to slap. 

Narim had responded to her as a person, a woman, and a scientist. He hadn't glazed over when she talked to him or blithely expected her to be available to have lunch with him to discuss theories he was still grappling with. He'd treated her as if she was special; someone extraordinary with whom he had been privileged to spend even a brief time. She had thought of that many times since; warmed her self-esteem on the memory that he, at least, a handsome intelligent man from a culture far advanced of her own, had thought she was someone worthy of his regard.

She said hoarsely, "Are we friends, Narim?"

He looked surprised. "Of course."

"Good." She couldn't stop the tears coming now, they were stronger than she was; accepting failure was accepting loss and a loss so huge it felt unbearable. It was shattering now, the realization that if there was nothing left to do except accept their absence, then Daniel and the colonel really were both gone forever. It was a struggle to find her voice through the sobs trying to break out: "I think… You know, there really aren't that many people who love me. I wouldn't even need both my hands to count them all, and I think I may just have lost two of the ones that matter most. So I think I may need the help of all the friends I have left…" And then the tears wouldn't be denied any longer and she was only grateful when he put his arms around her, only grateful when he held her as the sobs tore through her, when he whispered her name as gently as a prayer.

***

As he saw that big Jaffa and that much slighter so-familiar figure walking along next to him along the road from the Stargate, his heart began turning handsprings. Daniel. Alive. Alive and visibly untraumatized. Not even limping. Hands going as he talked nineteen to the dozen while the big guy nodded imperturbably and made the occasional grave response. It took all the self control he had to stand at the base of the stone staircase that led up to the temple of Apophis and only jiggle his hands in his pockets, grin inanely, and rock from his toes to his heels and back again, rather than sprinting down to meet them on the track.

As they got within Daniel's focusing range, the younger man glanced up and they exchanged a look. Daniel gulped and then the most incredible smile spread over his face; so sweet and so raw he looked on the point of tears. O'Neill's heart stopped doing handstands and sort of wriggled in his chest, like a speared fish, a slant of reflected light from that smile shining through him as if he were a cathedral on a dark winter day. He didn't think there was any need for words now; how Daniel felt about him was written on his face for everyone to read, and he had never seen anyone look so joyful to see anyone as Daniel looked to see Jack O'Neill alive and well and standing there waiting for him.

For some reason he still didn't go forward, letting Carter greet him first; so warmed and touched and honored by the look on Daniel's face when he gazed at him that he didn't even mind as she embraced Daniel as if she thought he might break. Daniel gave her a sweet smile, but nothing like as sweet as the one he'd given O'Neill, and his gaze kept going back to O'Neill as he was buffeted by waves of greeting; Kawalsky's embrace threatening to crack his ribs; Ferretti patting him on the shoulder with a look of genuine relief on his face; even Robertson nodding a greeting to him and telling him he'd done good to stay alive. Daniel responded to them with quiet appreciation, a smile and a nod to them, but his gaze didn't seem to want to flicker away from O'Neill's face. And every time theirs eyes met it was as if a light went on and bathed Daniel in its glow.

He hoped that the hug he gave him as they finally got close enough to touch would tell Daniel everything that he needed to know. He tried to put his heart and soul into it as he wrapped the guy in his arms, squeezed him close and breathed in the miraculous scent of his hair, murmuring, "Daniel…I…" Then, for the second time in his life, a Daniel Jackson was being wrenched out his arms by someone angry, male, and possessive. He realized his embrace must also have told the Teal'c guy everything __he__ needed to know and they were separated very swiftly, like teenagers found necking in a stern father's car.

"There can be no bonding without the proper agreement." Having yanked Daniel straight out of O'Neill's arms, Teal'c now held him away from him.

"What?" Daniel looked up at him in confusion. "But, Teal'c, you know I…"

The Jaffa gave him a glare of fierce disapproval that made Daniel swallow the end of his sentence, then looked at O'Neill with the kind of gaze that seemed to be able to strip skin and penetrate the dimmest darkest recesses of the subconscious mind. "It is necessary to have confirmation that the prospective bondsman's intentions are honorable."

Bra'tac and Teal'c exchanged a greeting then and from the snatched bits of Goa'uldspeak O'Neill overheard and recognized he gathered Bra'tac was defending him a little, telling Teal'c that O'Neill had made a public declaration before witnesses that he had come to love Daniel Jackson.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Daniel grasped that last bit and turned to look at O'Neill wide-eyed. O'Neill winced, grinned foolishly, and then quite possibly blushed. 

"He was courting Daniel while bonded to another?" Teal'c demanded shortly.

"He didn't court me," Daniel put in. "He never said a word to me that wasn't just…friendly."

Teal'c looked at O'Neill in disapproval. "Why not? If you truly had feelings for him why did you not make them known to him?"

Very aware of Kawalsky, Carter, Ferretti __et al__ all standing around wide-eyed getting a free earful of his private life, O'Neill gestured desperately at the temple. "Can we talk about this somewhere a little less public…?"

Inside, Teal'c and Bra'tac did most of the arguing while he and Daniel sat across a stone table sipping nervously from goblets of some low alcohol wine Teal'c thought suitable for their consumption while the two Jaffa debated their coming nuptials. They managed to whisper a few things to one another about what had taken place, like children passing notes in school. Daniel told him about the wild cats that had attacked them and how Teal'c had fought them off so bravely and how Teal'c had killed Heru'ur then dressed the corpse as a dead serpent guard, throwing Heru'ur's magnificent headdress and golden hand device out of the window to make it look as if he had been abducted in a different direction while they ran for the bay area. The rest of the escape sounded pretty exciting even when whispered furtively in between Daniel darting anxious glances at Teal'c who was being very firm with Bra'tac about what he would and would not agree to Daniel agreeing to. 

"What is with you and that guy anyway?" O'Neill hissed at him.

"He's a little over-protective," Daniel whispered back. "I think it's a cultural thing. And he lost his son. He may be regarding me as some kind of…substitute."

O'Neill winced as Teal'c slammed his hand down on the table and told Bra'tac something he didn't catch but which certainly sounded emphatic. "Ya think?"

Daniel gave him an under the eyelashes look, furtive and a little shy, as if he was covertly checking that O'Neill really was alive and well and not a mirage. "What happened with you…?"

He filled him in on the exciting details while Bra'tac and Teal'c brandished bits of paper at each other and talked about 'honor' a lot. Even telling the story of Carter being a Tok'ra now was a little hard to concentrate on fully when Bra'tac was informing Teal'c that he was impugning O'Neill's integrity by demanding such an agreement and Teal'c was coming right back at him with a lot of things about the need for Daniel to be protected from any future fickleness on O'Neill's part.

O'Neill rolled his eyes at Daniel. "He does know I can't get you pregnant, right?" Then as they stared at one another in shocked realization that it was now out in the open that they were intending to have sex, they both hastily looked at the faint markings on the stone surface of the table.

The Jaffa conversation ended in an explanation from Bra'tac, the man coming over to their table with a sigh and informing them that he and Teal'c had not yet been able to reach an accord although they were confident of doing so within the month. 

"What's the problem?" O'Neill enquired.

"It is the wording of the bonding agreement. I feel it would be more appropriate to your position as a warrior and your status in your own world as a leader of men if the boy was taken by you as an apprentice. Teal'c disagrees."

"Daniel is a scholar of great learning," Teal'c put in. "It would be inappropriate to his status on his own world to be given such a lowly position in O'Neill's household."

"I haven't even bought him dinner yet!" O'Neill protested.

Teal'c and Bra'tac looked at him in confusion. "What relevance do your eating habits have to this discussion, O'Neill?" Bra'tac enquired.

Teal'c frowned. "Are you not proposing to pay for Daniel's food when you have taken him into your household?"

O'Neill ran his hands through his hair. "Look, I haven't even…" He looked at Daniel then, gaze softening into an expression he was afraid probably bordered on the sappy. "I haven't told him how I feel about him."

"You can do so once the bonding agreement has been signed." Bra'tac waved that away as unimportant.

Teal'c looked down his nose at him. "Indeed. You may court him after you have given written assurances of the honorable nature of your intentions and guarantees of the status in your household that Daniel will be accorded, and lodged them with his guardians."

"We don't do things like that on our world, Teal'c," Daniel said tentatively.

Teal'c glared at him. "If you give yourself to this man as you are proposing you risk losing honor and status unless your position in his household is made clear from the outset."

Daniel blushed hotly and O'Neill didn't blame him. Playing hard to get became a little tricky when six foot four of Jaffa announced your intentions to the world. O'Neill reached across and took Daniel's hand, giving it a comforting squeeze. "Can we please have five minutes alone together?"

Teal'c looked outraged. "Certainly not." He slapped O'Neill's hand. Hard. 

"Ow!" O'Neill snatched his stinging hand away and looked at the guy in exasperation. "I just want to talk to him!"

Daniel held up his hands to Teal'c in a placating manner. "Teal'c, couldn't __we__ look at the agreements? Colonel O'Neill and myself? And decide which we think is the most…appropriate to our status…?"

"You?" Bra'tac looked astonished.

Teal'c also clearly found this idea incomprehensible. "Such things are never decided by the participants. Their parents or guardians or a third party skilled in such matters handles the negotiations. The partners must go to the bonded bed without the shadow of such matters between them."

O'Neill hated to admit it but he could…kinda…see the sense of that. He'd always wondered what kind of a crimp it put in those LA marriages after the groom or bride to be had slid the prenup across the coffee table and asked their prospective partner to sign and date on the dotted line. It was a little difficult to dress something up that was only going to be effective in case the relationship foundered, and was anyway based entirely on protecting the individual assets of someone who was about to promise to share all his or her worldly goods with another, as a sign of True Love. So, here on Chulak, the parents or guardians obviously haggled like fiends to try to get the best possible deal for their son or daughter, and then the little lovebirds skipped down the aisle together without ever having had to exchange an angry word yet secure in the knowledge that their best interests had been looked out for.

Daniel gave Teal'c a pleading look that would certainly have had O'Neill melting like chocolate in a microwave. "Colonel O'Neill and I might be able to find a…compromise that was acceptable to all parties."

Teal'c visibly weakened under the begging look from Daniel and his attempt to sound stern was half-hearted at best. "Do not agree to anything or sign anything."

"I promise I won't."

Teal'c darted a suspicious glance at O'Neill then bent down and murmured something in Daniel's ear which made Daniel dart a quick fluttering look at O'Neill, half-shocked, half-fascinated, which made an odd heat prickle under O'Neill's skin. "I won't do that either," Daniel said a little breathlessly

O'Neill became aware of Bra'tac tapping him on the shoulder and turned around. Bra'tac jerked his head in Daniel's direction. "Do not allow yourself to be weakened, O'Neill. You must maintain your status as a leader. This boy has already cost you your wife, do not allow him to cost you your self-respect."

O'Neill saluted briskly and then waited for Bra'tac and Teal'c to make their stern, straight backed, and oddly graceful way across the room. Then he turned to find himself alone with Daniel; the man of his dreams; a little bruised in places, with some healing scratches on his face and neck, but alive and well, and looking at O'Neill as if he was the most wonderful and awe-inspiring thing he'd ever seen in his life. Realizing belatedly, that he was probably doing the doting gazing thing as well, O'Neill coughed hastily and reached for the paperwork at the end of the table. "I guess we should probably take a look at this stuff. At least…go through the motions."

"Teal'c's been very good to me," Daniel admitted. "I'd like to respect his culture if I can."

"Maybe we can…sit next to each other…?" O'Neill suggested. "Help each other out with the tricky Goa'uld words."

Daniel opened his mouth, closed it again, darted a look at the door through which Teal'c had departed, and then moved around to O'Neill's side of the table.

It was with a slight sense of embarrassment not only for his own infatuation but for how much credence he was giving the whole Chulakian Jaffa cult that O'Neill realized it gave him the same breathless excitement, the same sense of doing something forbidden and daring, to move up the stone bench and let Daniel slip in next to him, as it had to kiss his first girlfriend at the grand old age of eight.

 

While the wintry sunlight of Chulak poured in through a stone-arched window to illuminate all the dust motes dancing in the air, O'Neill looked at the document again, tentatively turning the pages as if afraid they might break. Beside him, Daniel was doing the same thing. They were both more than a little embarrassed. Whenever they darted a glance at one another they found the other one looking at them. O'Neill was afraid he might actually have blushed at one point. 

He blamed Bra'tac and the Teal'c guy for this. They really knew how to put a crimp on a celebration. It wasn't that he'd been envisaging some kind of Heathcliff-and-Kathy windswept reunion; hadn't intended to throw his arms around Daniel and tell him that he loved him and wanted to be with him forever. He'd just hoped for something a little less…formal than this.

He was looking over the apprenticeship agreement, not understanding all of it, but understanding enough to become seriously indignant, while Daniel was making his way with painstaking care through some kind of marriage contract.

"This is nuts." O'Neill sat back on the bench. "This document is a crock from start to finish."

"It's just a different culture, Colonel."

"Please call me ‘Jack'," O'Neill sighed. He pushed the page under Daniel's nose and pointed to a line halfway down. "You think this isn't a crock?"

Daniel read it and then wrinkled his nose in a way that O'Neill had to admit if only to himself he found ludicrously cute. " _ _'The apprentice undertakes to be modest, docile, submissive, and obedient at all times…__ '"

"And what about this?" O'Neill turned the page. "The bit here where it says the circumstances under which I'm allowed to beat you if you're 'disobedient or disrespectful'? Somehow I don't see that panning out too well. And let's not even start on my conjugal rights." 

"You have to feed me though." Daniel pointed to the relevant paragraph, a smile playing on his lips. "And you're not allowed to loan me out to your friends."

"Well, who could say fairer than that?" O'Neill gave him a look of mingled fondness and exasperation. "Can we stop with this Jaffa crap now and have an intelligent conversation?"

Daniel looked a little skittish then. He rubbed his nose to hide the flicker of mild alarm in his eyes then put his hands neatly between his thighs, presumably so he wouldn't be tempted to wave them around the way he usually did; a self-muzzling action. "Okay."

O'Neill looked at his slightly hunched shoulders, his wary body language and that borderline panicked look in those too-expressive blue eyes. He spoke quietly, trying not too spook him any more than he obviously had already. "Daniel, the truth of the matter is, I'm in love with you. Are you in love with me?"

Daniel ducked his head, shoulders still hunched. His "yes" was so low O'Neill could hardly hear it.

O'Neill waited for Daniel to say something more helpful and edifying than 'yes', and when he didn't, cast around for inspiration. "You know I was married, right?"

"Yes."

Another guilty murmur from someone who was now showing all the relaxed confidence of a schoolboy abducted by a drunken uncle in a Ferrari; there was some excitement there, certainly, but also a lot of anxiety about the inevitable smash-up that must be awaiting him around the next bend.

"Well, I'm not any more. Married, that is. Sha're and I broke up."

"I'm sorry."

Daniel still wouldn't look at him and O'Neill wasn't sure how to proceed from this point. He scratched his jaw then essayed a charming smile. "I was kind of hoping you'd be pleased."

Daniel looked up at him in shock. "Pleased you're unhappy?"

"Pleased I'm single."

"Oh." Daniel glanced at him briefly, a look besotted, despairing, and wistful. "I am."

O'Neill shrugged helplessly. "I wasn't intending to play hard to get if that's what you're thinking." He gave him his best heartbreaker smile. "I mean if you want me, I'm right here." As Daniel still didn't say anything, he asked gently, "What's the problem, Danny?"

The way the younger man gave that little squirm of reaction to the nickname, like a puppy wanting to be tickled, made his heart give another of those weird flip-flop motions. When Daniel looked across at him it was with something very like adoration in those big blue eyes; but as he sheltered behind his bangs, Daniel was also looking sorrowful and guilty. O'Neill shook his head in confusion. "Just tell me what's wrong. Maybe I can fix it."

The words came out in a rush: "The Daniel in the other dimension…?"

"Yes."

"Did you and he…?"

Daniel's eyes were begging him to make his answer in the negative but he couldn't lie to this boy; it just wasn't in him. "Yes. Yes, we did."

His heart turned over at the abject misery in Daniel's eyes and then Daniel was ducking his head to hide his emotions. "So, that's why you want me? Because he broke up with you and you can't have him…?"

"Ibroke up with __him__ ," O'Neill stressed. "Do you want to know why?"

Daniel looked up at him, sad but resigned. "Do I, Jack?"

"I broke up with him because he wasn't in love with me and I wasn't in love with him, because he was in love with the O'Neill in his dimension and I was in love with the Daniel Jackson in mine." O'Neill waited to be believed and saw only someone desperately wishing that they could believe him but unable to accept it. With a sinking heart he thought of Daniel's personnel file. The orphanage. The foster homes. The rejections. Perhaps it was no wonder this boy was ready to believe that even another version of himself must be more loveable than he was. The other Daniel had been loved by Sha're; been chosen by someone whose opinion he respected. This boy had never been chosen by anyone, except O'Neill himself for the Stargate program. He wondered how much harm it had done him to find out about his counterpart. To think that for the first time in his life someone had selected __him__ and then to imagine he had discovered the real reason for this aberrant kindness, this apparent affirmation.

O'Neill knew he had charm in abundance, but he didn't seem to have the knack of appearing honest because Daniel was still looking sad and resigned, and as if O'Neill was the most wonderful thing he'd ever seen in his life and that he wasn't going to be allowed to keep him. Daniel lowered his gaze, murmuring ashamedly, "I'll do whatever you want to do. I know you don't like…" He winced then looked up at O'Neill. "I thought I'd lost you. I thought you were dead. I realized how much I…" He lowered his gaze again, repeating quietly, "I'll do whatever you want."

It was the same way Sha're had looked at him in that curtained off chamber that night, when she'd let her dress fall and offered herself to him with that look of helpless desperation in her eyes; someone pole-vaulting over a chasm and unable to see the other side. At the time, the kind thing to do had seemed to be to take her in his arms and kiss her, to reward her courage with proof of his answering attraction. That had also accorded with what his groin wanted after getting a look at her naked body. And for a moment the same impulse was there, not the lust, but the need to reassure the one being so courageous that they were desired in return, but something held him back. This was him getting everything he wanted; this beautiful young man head over heels in love with him; not believing for a minute that O'Neill was in love with him in return, but prepared to embark on a relationship anyway; prepared to let O'Neill do anything he liked to him just to have a few scrapings from the feast of love; even if it was the burnt bits that no one else wanted. But this time he didn't want things made easy for himself; this time he wanted the other person in the equation to know that they were loved. 

O'Neill found his voice with difficulty, "You know, I'm sure that's the complete opposite of the good advice that Teal'c guy just gave you."

"Pretty much, yes." A shadow of a wry smile but Daniel was so sad, for all his joy at having O'Neill next to him alive and well; already imagining the moment when O'Neill would grow bored with him and dump him, the substitute Daniel turning out to be no substitute after all, and shivering from how cold a place the world was going to seem on that day.

O'Neill wanted to put his arms around him and hold him close, but he could see the stubbornness of the other Daniel in this one now; the same locked-down determination to believe that he deserved bad things to happen to him because he was such a flawed person at heart. He tried to sound normal, to keep things light. "He seems like a nice guy. I'm certainly very grateful to him for killing Heru'ur and bringing my favorite archaeologist back to me safe and sound. Do you think we should offer him a place on SG-1?"

"Um…" Another look darted at him, trying to read him, not sure where the conversation was going. "I think he wants to free his people and to bring down Cronos. I think he thinks the best way to do that would be to stay here and maintain diplomatic relations with us. Maybe liaise with us and with the Tok'ra."

"Sounds fair enough." O'Neill reached past Daniel to the document the younger man had been examining. "May I…?"

Daniel gave him another of those looks from under his bangs that made O'Neill's heart catch in his chest. Did Daniel really not know how it made him feel when he looked at him like that? Ten feet tall and simultaneously the size of a flea because he wanted to be worthy of that look and knew himself too well to know he ever could be. Except he really did want to be, this time. Daniel protested weakly, "It's a marriage contract. It's not really appropriate to…"

O'Neill took it from him smoothly and opened it. It was tough for him to read Goa'uld still but wading through the damned apprentice agreement for the past few hours had sharpened up his skills. He began to read it as swiftly as he could, and then finding there was more and more in it that intrigued him, read it more carefully, weighing every word.

Daniel shifted awkwardly on the seat next to him. "Colonel, I mean…Jack…"

O'Neill turned in time to see that flicker of reaction go across Daniel's face as he said the word 'Jack', shy and proud and sounding a little breathless. It reminded him of his sister coming back from her honeymoon and introducing herself as 'Mrs Johnson'. It had felt all wrong to him, as if she was denying her innate O'Neillness, but it had clearly felt pretty wonderful to her to say the words out loud. That was how Daniel looked when he said 'Jack' or, come to think of it, when O'Neill called him 'Daniel'. His heart did another little handspring at the realization of how much he meant to this guy; what a responsibility that was; how the O'Neill he was right here and right now was going to find and hurt any O'Neill in the future who ever forgot just how damned fortunate he was to have someone this special think so much of a waste of space like himself. Realizing what he'd just thought, O'Neill winced. "I think we may have some self-esteem problems we're both going to have to grapple with."

"What?"

Daniel was giving him a 'duh' look which should have made him look dumb, instead it made him look adorable and fit to be eaten with a spoon… O'Neill wrestled his libido into submission, kicked it a couple of times while it was down and threatened to hogtie it if it didn't remember to treat Daniel with respect in future, and that included no salacious thoughts. He'd already screwed up with one Daniel going from zero to hard-on in sixty seconds so he wasn't making that mistake again.

"You were saying something…?" he prompted gently.

Daniel tried to act normal and casual. "I think you're wasting your time reading that contract thing. Why don't we just explain to Teal'c and Bra'tac that we're from a different culture and do things…differently where we come from?"

O'Neill made eye contact, wondering how Daniel could be gazing straight into his eyes in that half-hypnotized fashion and not see the love he was feeling. "Aren't you the one always telling me we could learn things from other cultures? That we don't have all the answers. That there are other things out there that just might have something to teach us?"

Daniel blinked at him. "A Chulakian marriage contract?"

That was good. Daniel was arguing with him. He was getting a hint of that 'Why can't this guy grasp what is so blindingly obvious to me?' expression to overlay the adoring lost puppy one. O'Neill actually really liked the adoring lost puppy one but it was hard to envisage an equal relationship with a guy who looked at you as if you had all the answers to every question and should really be accompanied by a heavenly choir. He wasn't going to tell him he approved of him arguing with him though or chaos would inevitably ensue. "Why not? There's a lot of good sense in here."

Daniel gave him a sideways look that was less full of admiration than a moment before and more inclined to question his sanity. O'Neill smiled inwardly. Good. Now they'd got over the realization they were both alive and well they could maybe stop being so jumpy and reverential with one another. "What good sense?" Daniel enquired in a tone that suggested he was going to take some convincing.

O'Neill turned the page. "Okay, well these guys are dealing with a culture where women don't have too many rights after they're married so they have to ensure that the guy treats them decently by putting it all into the contract. If you were the father of a daughter what would you want to know about the guy who was offering to marry her? I mean, he's going to get paid to marry her because Chulak has a dowry system, and you could be a wealthy guy so you need to know it's not just your money he wants, so you insist that he has enough to support her. See here." He pointed to the paragraph where the prospective bridegroom had to swear by the honor of his ancestors that he could keep a wife and any children she might have in the matter in which she had been accustomed to. "And this is a culture where status is very important so there have to be guarantees you're going to treat her in a way that's appropriate to her status, so no taking other wives and favoring them over her, an insistence that any children from the union with her will be your primary heirs – unless she's unfaithful to you, of course, whereupon the children get downgraded pretty damned sharpish."

"Well, that's true of many cultures similar to the Chulakian one…"

And at last he really did have Daniel back; not that kid who was all big blue eyes gazing with shy adoration at him from under those fair bangs, but the anthropologist who lectured him like a hall of not very bright students and who sighed heavily when he made jokes about Cleopatra's asp.

Now they were working through the contract together, turning glyphs into words they could recognize. The assurances that the bridegroom would treat the wife he was taking with 'reverence and affection' for so long as she was faithful to him. The sharing of wealth and property. The near-poetic paragraph which formed part of the bonding ceremony which made O'Neill realize this must be a rebel's marriage contract; those lines about 'the goddess of the red earth and the goddess of the silver sky looking over their nuptials with fierce joy' proving that this must be part of the new cults Bra'tac had mentioned, who had embraced the old cults of earth and nature goddesses in denial of Apophis's claims to divinity. He told a fascinated Daniel what Bra'tac had told him while thinking all the time that he was running his fingers across a rebel Jaffa marriage contract. He'd never been able to envisage himself in a church before a priest saying a lot of stuff he didn't intend to stick to under the aegis of a god he didn't believe in, but so far there hadn't been a word here that stuck in his craw the way the old 'love, honor and obey' stuff had. 

"This is like Parzival." Daniel was completely absorbed in the document, forgetting all his earlier awkwardness about being exposed as someone head over heels in love in the fascination of this glimpse into another culture.

"What is?"

"The clause about the wedding night." Daniel pointed to a paragraph, elegant fingers tracing the Goa'uld hieroglyphs so much more easily now than he had before this mission. He'd clearly had a crash course in Goa'uld from Teal'c. O'Neill though of the inside of the tel'taks he'd been on before, all those gold hieroglyphs, and Teal'c and Daniel had been flying around for days evading capture. He'd assumed they would have snatched some food and sleep in between that hot shot flying Teal'c had used to keep them alive, but, no, evidently Daniel had spent the time like a six year old on his first trip to the museum, pointing and asking 'What does that say?'

"In what way like…who?"

Daniel was still reading the glyphs, answer endearingly absent-minded, the man whose first name he could hardly say without blushing temporarily forgotten in the fascination of a new cultural concept. "Parzival. He and Condwiramurs didn't consummate their marriage for three nights. It was a new elevation in the concept of courtly love."

O'Neill scratched his neck. " 'Condwiramurs' isn't the kind of name that exactly trips off the tongue, is it?"

"They were one of the most devoted couples in all the romantic narrative poems, Jack."

"But what did he call her for short? 'Condi'? 'Ramurs'? It's not the kind of name you can just whisper in someone's…"

"Well, in the Chretien version she's Blanchefleur but… Never mind her name. Concentrate on the concept. As the father of a daughter I would have thought you'd be pleased that chivalry has been elevated to law on Chulak."

O'Neill gave him a level look. "As the father of a daughter, I can assure you that my daughter will never have sex on any night, because any guy who so much as __thinks__ about sleeping with Katy I will hunt down and kill before throwing his dismembered remains to wild dogs."

Daniel's tongue flickered across his lips in a way that was maddening on every possible level. "Well, like you said, when women's equality isn't written into the fabric of a society it tends to need to be written down somewhere else. Psychotic fathers not withstanding."

O'Neill looked at him. So serious and so intent on those alien glyphs, absorbed in this contract and what it said about the culture that had devised it. O'Neill knew why the hero hadn't consummated the marriage for three days, because what better proof could you give a woman who knew you loved her that you didn't just want her for her body. Daniel was still reading; the light from the window casting a curl of light around the back of his neck, gilding the curve of one lobeless ear, turning dark honey-colored hair to gold. O'Neill said quietly, "I could sign this one."

"What?" Daniel looked up at him in shocked surprise.

O'Neill shrugged. "I could sign this." 

Daniel gazed at him, lips slightly parted, disbelief in his eyes, then he looked back at the document before glancing up at Jack. He tried to smile as if they were joking but the look in his eyes was all shock. "I… We…" He lowered his gaze again, speaking gruffly, trying to be casual. "It's for a man's bonding to a woman, Jack. Which I'm not, by the way."

O'Neill shrugged. "All it needs is to have one word changed throughout. I'm sure we could find some handy scribe to oblige us."

Daniel half-laughed. "It's okay. You really don't have to make an…honest archaeologist of me, and I don't have a father who'll come after you if you don't pledge me your troth."

"I know that. I just want to."

Daniel looked at him in bewilderment. "Why?"

"Because I love you."

He said it as matter of factly as he could manage it; devoid of sap and mendacity. Daniel said, "No, you…"And then broke off fast.

O'Neill gave him the look he used on raw recruits who weren't properly respectful. " 'No'?"

Daniel made one of those little gestures with hands and eyebrows and eyes darting to some place on the ceiling. "I'm just saying that…you don't have to…marry me to get me into bed."

O'Neill met his gaze unblinkingly. "And what __I'm__ saying, Doctor Jackson is that I want everything above board and signed and sealed before we go anywhere near any bedrooms." He didn't say __this time__ but he was afraid that was what Daniel was hearing.

Daniel sighed and looked at the contract. "All the paperwork in the world won't make me someone other than I am, Jack."

"Good." O'Neill was brisk now. "As I like you just the way you are, that's a great relief to me." 

The younger man was still looking at him in puzzled non-comprehension. He touched the parchment tentatively. "I really don't see how this is…relevant to our situation."

"Why not? There's nothing here I don't agree with. I wasn't intending to supplant you with another lover; or deny your position in my household to others; to beat you or insult you; to keep the choicest cuts of meat for myself and leave lesser fare for you; to force myself upon you in the marriage bed or deny you a fair share of my worldly wealth. I'm happy to pledge before witnesses and in a document affixed with my seal by a notary appointed by a priest to his task that you are the one I love, the only one I love, and to you I give all the good that lies within me, and from you I promise to keep all the darkness in my soul." He kept looking into Daniel's eyes with every word and saw him affected by the power of them, the ancient text finding a way to his heart when no amount of modern declarations could. Still looking at him unblinkingly, O'Neill asked, "Could you sign it, Daniel?"

"Yes." Daniel was still looking at him with a dawning realization in his eyes that perhaps O'Neill might actually be telling the truth. O'Neill wasn't sure if the younger man even knew he'd just said that aloud. 

"Say it again, Daniel," he coaxed gently. "Could you put your name to this?"

Daniel swallowed. "Yes."

O'Neill smiled at him. "Then let's get married." As Daniel was still blinking at him in a kind of happy bewilderment, he raised his voice quickly, calling to Teal'c and Bra'tac that they could come back in now. He and Daniel had both found an agreement they were happy to sign.

***

He'd never really learned how to give up. It was a characteristic he shared with Daniel. Which was why Daniel was still breathing in and out despite the way the infection from his shoulder had got into his bloodstream and was burning, freezing, and shaking him with fever; Daniel was still fighting, tough as old leather despite looking all pale and wan on the outside. He couldn't get outside even if helped now, peeing had to be done into a hollowed out water melon type gourd with O'Neill holding his dick in the right place while Daniel closed his eyes in humiliation. Bowel movements and vomit involved even more squirming around from the patient while O'Neill wondered how someone who could speak so many languages couldn't grasp 'I don't mind doing this, not even a little bit' in English, even when said a dozen times a day. Daniel still clutched the blanket to himself when being washed and said it didn't matter, really, he was fine, even though he always looked so much better after he'd been sponged clean. O'Neill made it a point of pride that Daniel should be kept clean and fed with an empty bladder and bowels. If there was nothing else he could do for the man, he could at least do that.

A part of O'Neill probably did know that it was hopeless, but he'd always been an optimist, always thought that while there was a will there was an 'or' right up until the moment when he'd lost his son and had felt himself freezing from the heart outwards into someone he barely even recognized. So that was why he was doggedly persevering with Plan A. Plan B involving sitting on the beach and rocking with his head in his hands while he sobbed because his friend was dying and there was nothing he could do to save him. Plan A involved cutting into his skin until the blood welled up, sharp and salt, and he spread across the open cut the mashed pulp of yet another flower, or leaf, or bark. This time it was the bark. He had dared the orange-eyed snake to steal fruit and flower, seed and leaf, and now there was only the bark left to try. He'd mashed it into a hollow of worn rock with the butt of his gun and it was oozing a poisonous-looking white sap now, bubbling a little in the sunlight. The leaf had worked pretty well for scratches, didn't exactly do anything miraculous but did take a little of the sting out of a new cut. He'd been applying that to Daniel's shoulder and Daniel said it helped. But then Daniel also said the festering hole in his shoulder really didn't hurt that much and of course he'd be fine for an hour while O'Neill did whatever he needed to do. He usually said he really thought he'd be able to keep this meal down just before he vomited it over both of them…

One time when he'd done that there had been a splinter in time where fear had shown in Daniel's eyes as he darted a glance at the man he'd just been sick on, and O'Neill had seen it like a movie flashback, some time in the orphanage when Daniel had done just that and some lowly helper or maybe even older boy unwillingly taking care of the younger ones, in the first disgust and revulsion of being sprayed with someone else's puke, had hit him. Then Daniel had blinked as he realized where he was, winced apologetically at O'Neill and said how sorry he was. But as O'Neill had cleaned them both up before sluicing his clothes and Daniel's blanket in the sea, he'd kept seeing that look in Daniel's eyes in that frozen instant when he'd thought he was going to be slapped, and how he'd never seen it in his eyes before, not when O'Neill yelled or threw things or even looked as if he was truly going to lose his temper. It made him realize how much the younger man must have trusted him all these years. Even though he'd beaten him once when in the grip of the Touched virus, Daniel had never looked scared when he raised his voice to him, just stubborn and occasionally angry. Daniel thought he was a good man. That was one of the things he'd realized about him early on, that Daniel didn't see him as some murderer of innocents; didn't see Teal'c that way either. He thought of them as protectors of the defenseless; wrong-headed protectors at times, certainly, but essentially good people at heart. When O'Neill looked as if he was going to be something other than good, there was as much disbelief in Daniel's anger with him as disappointment.

But those drift-outs were getting more and more common; moments when Daniel didn't seem to recognize him or called for him in panic and then didn't know if he'd been asleep or awake. Delirious ramblings about Sha're and others that made no kind of sense; then those times of total lucidity when Daniel could have played chess if they'd had a board, and beaten him. As Daniel began to drift away from him back into the fever world, O'Neill would talk louder and louder to try to anchor him in the here and now, tell jokes, reminisce; he would have tap-danced to keep him here. 

A few nights before the ground had shaken underneath him, waking him with a start. He'd lain there shuddering from the aftershocks, still vaguely dreaming of trains, thinking that noise was the rattle of the subway until he remembered where he was and that Daniel was here with him, dying slowly day by day. When the minor quake hadn't awoken Daniel he'd spent a moment of terror thinking he'd died, having to put his face right by Daniel's mouth to check that he was still breathing. Feeling the relief as sharp as the fear when he realized there was still a warm gust of air against his skin. 

Now he closed his eyes and saw a collage of Daniel images; floppy fair-haired geek nuisance on Abydos, who had so quickly become floppy fair-haired geek who'd given his own life to save O'Neill's. Daniel bending over him anxiously as he awoke from unconsciousness. Daniel angry. Daniel so sad it broke the heart. Daniel bugging out on him in that padded cell. Daniel smiling that heartbreaking smile of his when someone was saved from the brink. Daniel crying in his arms, body feeling so vulnerable, tears hot and salt on his neck. Daniel – he made himself remember it – naked under that other O'Neill being fucked with those determined thrusts, sweat beading his jaw, eyes closing in time to each pump of the other O'Neill's hips. For the first time he let himself admit that if it had to be any man fucking Daniel he wanted it to be him. It didn't have a lot to do with lust; he could see Daniel's body was pleasing to the eye, just as he could see that Carter's was; but he wasn't obsessed with the idea of him naked. Wanting him for himself had more to do with their unique connection; what they meant to one another; the fact that he didn't want to share him with anyone else because in his heart of hearts he really thought of Daniel as his. 

For the last few years the only people who had pressed their lips to Daniel's had been strangers. Even Sha're was someone Daniel had only known for a matter of hours the first time they'd had sex, and after her had come a succession of one night stands, quite often while under the influence of something mind-altering: Melosha, Hathor, Shyla, Ke'ra, Kagen. Apart from Ke'ra, where he'd been bouncing so fast on the rebound he'd barely known who he was, and in any case was wild to pay the world back for killing his wife… Come to think of it the two people he'd been angriest with had been O'Neill and Teal'c; and the two people who'd minded the most that Daniel had just been jumped by yet another femme fatale had been…O'Neill and Teal'c. Perhaps Daniel had picked his vengeance against those who'd failed to save his wife with more care than it had seemed at the time. But apart from Ke'ra, all those women had done Daniel when he hadn't been himself. Compared with being raped by a captive host with a snake in her head; or run through a sarcophagus a dozen times just so some hormonal princess could get her rocks off, O'Neill was pretty normal. Wrong gender maybe, but at least he wasn't a stranger, had feelings for him, wouldn't be using him for his own perverted purposes, was someone familiar and tender who Daniel recognized. Then there was the other O'Neill to consider. Another stranger albeit one with a friend's face. The son of a bitch who had kissed him within hours of their first meeting, enticed him into his bed within days, fucked him for fun for a few weeks then dumped him for reasons O'Neill still wasn't too clear about. That had really been the writing on the wall. The guy had seen a hole and had filled it, in every sense of the word; but this O'Neill was the one who had left Daniel vulnerable to that intergalactic Casanova's wiles. O'Neill was the one who'd stamped around the place, pushing him away, denying their friendship, biting his head off, anything rather than admit that he cared for him a lot more than he was supposed to; loved him in a way that meant some action needed to be taken. Loved him a way that no one had loved Daniel since Apophis had stolen his wife and his happiness and left him dazed and heartsick and wandering the worlds of the 'Gate system trying to find something that was already gone.

O'Neill opened his eyes and found the sea was still undulating in the heat haze of the horizon, the gulls still calling, the clouds still unraveling in faint white wisps, that nothing had changed and everything had changed, because now he wasn't a man poised on the brink of losing his best friend; he was a man poised on the brink of losing the man he loved.

That was when he noticed his arm. Peeling off the leaf pulp and bark pulp over the past few days hadn't always been for the faint-hearted. Once a thin layer of skin had come off with the leaf, so delicate he could see the sand through it, but no longer attached to his arm the way it was supposed to be. There had been yellow pustules that oozed a thin honey-colored wetness, blisters that popped and left open sores on his skin, raised bumps that itched, a white rash that stung, and various kinds of discoloration. This time there was nothing. No itching, burning, or stinging. Oddest of all, there was hardly any pain. Curious, he picked off the bark pulp. He'd spread it unevenly and had missed a bit. There the cut was angry and red, still oozing blood, a hyphen of hurt; but to each side there was a pink line like last week's wounds, and apart from a faint tingling of numbness where the bark sap seemed to have neutralized the pain, there was nothing else to show there had been a fresh gash there a few minutes ago.

He made himself wait an hour to see if he puked, passed out or died, spreading more of the bark on the last part of the cut to see if it would heal and then when it did, almost sprinting to dare the snake again; ignoring the threat of its flickering forked tongue, scraping the bark in clean thin slices with his knife, feathery flakes of hope. He mashed the collected bark fragments into a white-oozing pulp which he scraped into a hollowed coconut shell and sealed with a leaf and liana arrangement to keep it cool and wet. He looked back at the sweeping second hand of his watch much too often, willing an hour to have passed, knowing he couldn't wait the designated five, shaking it repeatedly to see if it had stopped.

Then the ten remaining minutes melted into seconds and he was walking towards the hut, heart beating too fast because what if it didn't work, or had come too late. Then the dazzling daylight became the dark of the cabin, the ammonia tang of Daniel's urine, the damp aroma of the seawater he had last washed the blanket in, blackness gradually lightening to shadows, glimpses, and then by grace of a spiraling twist of light finding its way through the roof leaves, there was Daniel.

"Daniel…" he whispered his name and heard the change in his voice, ludicrous sap, a full string quartet and dozen long stemmed roses tone, as if he was about to go down on one knee and offer him a ring. Except it was life he hoped that he was offering him. 

Long eyelashes flickered and Daniel surfaced blearily, blinking crusted eyelids, trying to moisten dry lips with a dry tongue. But there was that smile for him, his name murmured in a croak, relief undisguised.

"Thirsty?" O'Neill put a hand behind his head and held the halved coconut shell of water to his lips. Rainwater religiously collected and then all the taste boiled out of it as Daniel always complained. Daniel drank gratefully, swallowing with care around the raw strips of infection lining his throat.

He lowered Daniel's head back onto the makeshift pillow that was O'Neill's jacket stuffed with leaves. "How's the shoulder?"

The flicker of evasion in Daniel's eyes told him everything he needed to know. The forced smile, so unlike the one he met him with on waking. "Fine." Would that bright tone have fooled someone else? O'Neill doubted it. 

"I've got some new ointment to try out. It may sting a little…" He burbled on in Janet Fraiser mode as he lifted back the blanket, unwound the bandage then scooped the white pulp onto his fingertips and began to spread it gently across the wound. Daniel was already drifting back to sleep, wincing a little as the inflamed skin of his shoulder was touched, murmuring vaguely, "That's great, Jack" as he tried to sound encouraging; trying to keep up O'Neill's spirits and divert him from prospect of his inevitable abandonment. He was unconscious again before O'Neill had finished wrapping the bandage around the leaf-covered pulp to hold it all in place.

 

Four hours later and O'Neill couldn't pretend he was really mending this fishing net. He had done some repair work on the roof, finished the final wall of the permanent shelter and thought about improvements. Above the wood and bamboo planking, the floor needed to have a woven layer, he thought, a nice thick pallet. He'd made sure it was raised a good two feet from the ground and the short bamboo staircase leading down from it was now tied into place. He liked the feel of it when he stepped inside; the woven walls and leafy roof made it smell fresh and clean. He liked the hollow feel and sound of the floor beneath his feet, also enjoyed anticipating the muffled noise his boots would make on the matting floor he hadn't woven yet. He was already planning an extension. A bedroom area off the main room. If he kept thinking positive thoughts about the future, perhaps there actually would be a future to enjoy.

He managed to kill three hours doing cabin work, albeit a three hours punctuated by him going back to the temporary shelter every ten minutes to just check that Daniel was still breathing. He had to fight not to undo the bandage around his shoulder on each visit, telling himself the bark pulp couldn't do its work unless it was given time in which to do so. Peering at Daniel in the dim light to see if he looked any better hadn't achieved a lot either. For the last hour he'd more or less thrown in the towel. It was idiotic to mend a net that involved careful knotting in a dark shelter when there was dazzling daylight outside, but he preferred to sit in here, mending the holes by touch and no doubt ruining a perfectly good net in the process. It didn't matter. If Daniel lived he would have energy enough to knot a thousand nets. If even this stuff didn't save him then O'Neill wouldn't care if he ate fish again or not. He couldn't bury Daniel and not bury his own heart with him; it was not an infinitely resilient organ and his had already taken too many near-mortal blows. Charlie. Sara. Kawalsky. And then all those near-misses where he'd thought Teal'c or Carter or Daniel were gone for good this time. It should have made him tougher, more resilient, but all it had done was wear his soul a little finer, a little less able to take another hit.

When Daniel began to stir, he switched on the flashlight, hoping and fearing to see some change. If there was no improvement this was his last hope gone…

"Jack…?"

"Hey, Daniel…" He turned the flashlight so there was no danger of it dazzling him but Daniel blinked all the same. O'Neill raised his head for him, the way he always did, held the coconut half to his lips so he could drink.

"I feel…" Daniel winced, reaching out to catch at O'Neill's arm, pulling himself up with an effort. "Ow…"

"You okay?"

Daniel flickered him a look that was vintage Pissy Boy Jackson. "Dumb question."

O'Neill felt a smile beginning to uncurl inside him, like a flower opening to the sun. He made a valiant effort to suppress it a little longer. "Well, let me think. When you're genuinely dying you're heartbreakingly sweet, brave, and lovable. When you're not mortally wounded, you're crabby, sarcastic, and annoying. I think you're a little better, Doctor Jackson."

Daniel gazed at him then, both reading in the other's eyes the realization that something had really changed; that Daniel was no longer so weak he could barely lift his head unaided, no longer burning up with fever, no longer sick from the constant pain in his shoulder, the burning sickness in his bloodstream. Daniel said breathlessly, "What did you do?"

And now O'Neill could feel himself grinning like a bona fide village idiot. "I followed your advice. Don't I always follow your advice?"

"No, you usually ignore everything I…" Daniel gripped his arm tighter, a wave of faintness rippled through him visibly, a flicker of nausea, but his skin had color again and it was no longer burning with fever. He rested his head against O'Neill's shoulder. "I feel better, Jack," he said faintly. "I feel so much better it's scary. What happened?"

"Well, you damned near died, and then we both decided we didn't like that plan so we changed it." As Daniel made to get up, O'Neill gripped him gently by the arms. "But you're still weak as the proverbial kitten, so I think we'll save the softball practice for tomorrow. It's not really going to matter if you miss another day." O'Neill lowered him gently back onto the pallet and then began to unbandage his shoulder.

Daniel said blearily, "I missed softball practice?"

"Every day since we arrived here." This bandage seemed to go on forever.

Daniel blinked at him. "Did you wait for me?"

"Sure I did." O'Neill gestured towards the open door of the cabin. "I've wasted hours on that beach waiting for you to show up." He unwound the last of the bandage, then very gently eased back the dark green leaves, they were covered in blood and pus, all sticky with white gunge. More of the white stuff covered the wound and he sloshed some of the drinking water on it, making Daniel gasp with the shock of cold water on his skin. The wound was smeared with diluted white sap, but he could see it clearly enough. It was healing. There was pink skin around the hole, and no pus oozing from the wound, only a faint well of blood diluted by white cells. O'Neill couldn't speak for a moment for the lump in his throat. Realizing for the first time why people in olden times had made offerings to the gods, shed blood and burnt flesh to appease and thank them, because if there was a chance it would help why not slit the throat of that drugged goat and bless whatever goddess you thought was watching over you. Fate or chance or luck had gifted him a miracle. All those thousands of plant and tree species on this island and he had chosen the right one. No, not chosen, been led to by the snake; because it made that tree different from the others; made it a little more difficult; a challenge he hadn't been able to turn down. If he'd been a religious man he would have lit a candle to someone; as it was he felt a sense of benevolence to the world at large that had paid some of the dues it owed him by giving him a little nudge in the right direction. He reached for some more of the paste and began to smear it back over the wound to let it continue its good work, then began tying a fresh bandage.

Daniel said softly, "I'm sorry."

"What?" he looked at him in shock.

Daniel was giving him that sweet smile again, but not the look of the dying to the living now, not the look of a man foreseeing no future for himself, a steady smile from one living man to another. "Sorry you had to wait so long for me to join you."

O'Neill bent and kissed him gently on the forehead, a thank you for being strong enough not to just float away into a fever sleep and never wake up. "Thanks for sticking around, Daniel."

Daniel looked up at him as if he had never seen him before and as if he was the most familiar thing he'd ever known; O'Neill couldn't tell who Daniel was looking at for a moment: a stranger he felt he'd been waiting to meet, or a friend he hadn't seen in so long he'd almost forgotten what he looked like. It was the same mixture of wonder and of relief. Daniel swallowed, "No trouble at all, Jack. Thanks for…you know…" he shrugged, trying to keep it casual, "Risking your life to save mine…working your gonads off to try to keep me breathing in and out…the usual."

O'Neill finished rebandaging his shoulder and then covered him with the blanket. "No problem. Now get some rest."

"Okay." Daniel was still watching him from the pillow. As O'Neill made to move away, Daniel caught his wrist, gently, and turned his arm to examine it. He ran a finger gingerly across the ridges of the healing cuts, feeling their texture. "You did it to yourself." Not a question. He swallowed, trying to sound conversational. "Do you have any idea how dumb that was?"

"Time for you to __sleep__ now," O'Neill told him firmly. "I'll wake you when the food is ready."

Daniel wrinkled his nose. "Macaroni and cheese?"

"None left, you'll be broken-hearted to hear, so you'll have to have fish stew with healing leaf garnish, bark pulp, and coconut milk."

Daniel licked his lips. "That actually sounds pretty good. How long until it's cooked?"

"I have to catch the fish first." It was a lie. The fish trap was full, he'd checked it earlier, but he wanted him to sleep.

He watched Daniel close his eyes, sinking towards slumber, and only then said, "There's just one more thing."

"What's that…?" As he'd expected, Daniel didn't even open his eyes.

"I'm in love with you. Have been for a while. Call me if you need to pee, okay?"

He was out of the shelter by the time Daniel had groped his way back to some kind of consciousness and was calling after him hoarsely, "What did you just say? Jack? __Jack…__?"

Whistling as he worked, O'Neill hauled up the fish trap and began to prepare the fish for their evening meal.

***

They lay together in the near-darkness, limbs prickling with heightened awareness, flesh pulled in tight beneath over-sensitive skin, so eager and so afraid to touch. Candle flames floated on the breeze from the open window; drapes fluttered like netted birds; one candle danced too low in the night air and dissolved into smoke. 

In the next chamber a parchment with its signatories and witness marks had been rolled and sealed with candlewax. Pewter plates still bore the crumbs of __benret__ – sweet date cakes – and goblets wore the red stains of __irep dabew ¬–__ a powerful fig wine. O'Neill could still taste the flavor of both on his tongue. 

In yet another chamber O'Neill knew Carter and Martouf would be lying, as he and Daniel were lying, close enough to touch, speaking in whispers. Waiting for Jacob Carter to arrive and hear Martouf's explanation of why his daughter was now a Tok'ra again. He wondered if they would fuck while they still could, before parental wrath enveloped them or parental absolution was granted. He supposed it would be a test of whether or not Jacob was truly contented as a Tok'ra. He'd told O'Neill enough times that to be a Tok'ra was to never be lonely, never be left without someone to talk to; but was it something he would really want for his daughter. They knew the Tok'ra had been in need of hosts since Jacob had blended with Selmac but they had never again asked the people of Earth to assist them, never again argued that in keeping their alliance with the Tok'ra secret they were denying the right of those terminally ill on this world the chance to do as Jacob had done. Perhaps this was what Carter had needed to do though; she'd been confused for so long now about whose heart was feeling what; did she love Martouf or did the memory of Jolinar just still love Lantesh. It was the kind of question to which there was no answer; the truth was probably somewhere in between. Martouf was handsome, and could be a little cold, and could also be warm enough to melt an ice cap when he looked at Carter. They'd been through hell with Martouf, and O'Neill had been forced to admit the guy had pulled his weight and more. There had been a subtle shift in the Carter-Martouf dynamic after that. A new closeness. Jacob had started talking to Martouf the way one talked to a son, the same irascibility, the same pride one tried and failed to conceal. Now there was a new snake in her head, with no feelings except friendship for the snake inside Martouf, perhaps now finally Carter would get to find out whose feelings she was feeling; whether it was her heart or only Jolinar's that Martouf had finally won.

That low murmur through the open window was Teal'c and Bra'tac debating the future of mankind. Or mankind as they knew it. All those enslaved Jaffa on all those enslaved worlds. Setting themselves what they considered achievable goals, which seemed to be: Defeat Cronos. Free humankind on every world from their subjugation by the Goa'uld. Find a way to rid themselves of the symbiotes which would not cost them their lives. Not men for easy options, those two, and much better to have as allies than as enemies.

And he was lying here in this darkness, in this bed, by the flickering shadowlight of those guttering candles, listening to Daniel's breathing coming too fast and too loud as his heart hammered in the bone cage of his chest.

They were allowed to touch if they wanted to, and O'Neill certainly wanted to. But when he closed his eyes he saw himself seducing the other Daniel; kissing him in that motel room, catching him off guard, still halfway through a sentence, nervous and jumpy; in need of someone else taking control. He'd taken control, kissed him deeply, in a way that could only be a prelude to sex; kissed him again when he tried to speak; slipped a warm hand under his shirt to make him gasp with a surprise that quickly turned to arousal. That Daniel had been so responsive to being touched; so in need of being touched; unable to resist someone who offered him the semblance of kindness. Someone telling him he was beautiful, irresistible, kissing him, urging him with quiet determination towards the nearest bed, tipping alcohol down his throat and then plundering his wine-filled mouth with more kisses. How he must have needed it: that facsimile of lost affection. He would probably have melted just as fast if this O'Neill had ruffled his hair and called him 'Dannyboy', patted him on the shoulder, asked him how he was doing. The guy had been so damned trusting and O'Neill knew it wasn't trust he had either merited or had earned. This was all for the other O'Neill. The one who must have seen him drunk a few dozen times but had never used his inability to hold his liquor as a means to get him into the bedroom. 

God, he'd wanted him though. Had been thinking about making love to him ever since their first meeting; what it would be like; the way it would feel as his cock slid inside him… In his fantasy, Daniel had been kneeling on the bed so that was the position he'd urged him into and it had probably been a mistake. They weren't in eye contact at the crucial moment, rendering the sex a series of slightly painful things he was doing to the younger man instead of something they were doing together. He didn't think the other Daniel had liked the sex very much the first time. He'd tensed up and it had probably hurt him a little. O'Neill had been torn between not making him any sorer than he already was and wanting to show him how good this could be if he would just find a position that was comfortable for both of them. Face to face had been much better, the guy could read in O'Neill's eyes that there was nothing but affection for him there, could see what was happening so it wasn't such a shock when that head breached his ring the second time. There had also been the benefit of seeing for himself when he hit his prostate, those flickers of surprised pleasure on his so-expressive face. Such a sweet guy, so damaged and so in need of the kind of love this O'Neill couldn't give him, not because he was incapable of it, but because he was always going to be the wrong 'Jack' for this Daniel.

He thought how much that O'Neill must hate him. Every bit as much as he would hate an O'Neill who took advantage of his Daniel. He made himself imagine it, the young man lying next to him wandering into a different dimension where an O'Neill who was all old come-on lines and surface charm oiled him with liquor into the nearest bed. He thought of the Daniel he had sworn and signed to protect on his knees in a motel bedroom somewhere, giggling nervously as a warm arm was wrapped around him, hot suggestions whispered in his ear, lobe nibbled then nipped as a distraction while fingers skillfully prepared him for sex. One day he'd like to tell the other O'Neill it hadn't been like that. That he'd had feelings for that Daniel too; had been moved and touched by him and his emotional vulnerability as much as he had been aroused and seduced by his physical charms. He doubted the other O'Neill would listen though. If some other O'Neill ever kissed the Daniel lying beside him now, let alone thought about fucking him in some seedy motel bedroom, the only thing he'd ever want to hear from that guy would be the death rattle of his laboring lungs as he died.

Daniel whispered hesitantly, "Are you thinking about…him?"

O'Neill turned onto his side to look at him, Daniel lying naked under a cover, an inch from his own naked body, both of them breathing too quickly, skin chilled from the night air where the space blanket didn't cover them, sweat sticky in every crevice where it did. Daniel skin looked pale in the darkness but even by the candlelight his eyes were distractingly blue. "Yes," O'Neill admitted, "I am." He watched Daniel wince, curling up inside like a dying leaf, then added quietly, "I'm thinking that if any guy ever treated you the way I treated him, I'd shoot him."

Daniel's perfect mouth formed an 'o' of non-comprehension it took every ounce of self-control O'Neill had not to plunder. 

O'Neill continued steadily, "If we ever run into the other O'Neill again he probably will shoot me."

"Why?" Daniel frowned. "What did you do that was so terrible?"

"I hurt someone he loved. And anyway, we're territorial kind of people. We really don't like to share." He looked at Daniel sideways. "You remember the bit in the contract about me being permitted to raise an army in the name of the goddess if anyone abducts you from my bed by either force or guile?"

"Yes. I still think we should have cut that paragraph."

"It's one of my favorites."

Daniel looked at him under his eyelashes, slightly suspicious, impossibly hot. "This is a whole new…unevolved side of you I didn't know existed, Colonel."

"Daniel, you married me two hours ago, before witnesses and whatever god that priest guy was talking to. We're lying in the same bed naked. I think you really ought to call me 'Jack'. And besides… I've never had a Daniel Jackson call me that before. I kind of like it."

Daniel blinked. "He had sex with you and he didn't call you by your first name? What kind of a weirdo, was he?"

O'Neill saw a glimmer of light on the horizon. For the first time Daniel seemed to be grasping that his and the other Daniel's affair hadn't been that Perfect Union of Hearts and Minds he'd been fearing. Perhaps in time he would actually realize what a confused tangle of conflicting emotions and needs it had truly been. "I wasn't the O'Neill he was in love with. That guy was 'Jack'."

"What were you? Chopped liver?"

Daniel was getting righteously indignant with his other dimension counterpart. O'Neill guessed there must be some leftover protective feeling from Daniel brought on by thinking he was dead. And no doubt his lying here naked next to him was bringing out some of that in the younger man as well. He reached across and stroked Daniel's fringe back from his eyes, whispering, "I didn't call him 'Daniel' either. You were 'Daniel'. I fucked him in seedy motel rooms and then I broke up with him, and if the other O'Neill ever sees me again I think he'll definitely kill me."

"What did you call him?"

"Doc."

"'Doc'?" Daniel sounded disbelieving. "You had sex with someone you were calling by a __nickname__?"

O'Neill shrugged, sighed. "Daniel, I've had sex with people I've called 'You there' in the past. Not to mention 'What's your name again?' and, after particularly wild parties, 'Who the hell are you?'"

And, against all expectations, Daniel looked impressed, reminding O'Neill that as well as being a person who was in love with him, Daniel was also a young male who had spent a lot of nights with only his text books and his right hand for company. Daniel darted him a sideways look, "So, you were really…promiscuous then? Before you joined the Air Force? Parties and drugs and threesomes and things?"

O'Neill nodded, torn between his urge to assure a lover that he was not the total sleazeball these revelations were making him sound and wanting to impress another guy with his admittedly rather extensive sexual track record. "And not just before I joined the Air Force either."

"Doesn't General Hammond mind?" Daniel looked a little wistful, as if he was thinking he'd missed out; which he had. One look at his personnel files told the story of a guy who had spent far too much time trying to get straight 'A's and far too little time getting blasted out of his skull on alcohol and drugs before getting sweaty and naked with people he'd just met.

"A little. He wants me to settle down with a nice girl – or a nice boy – and stop playing the field. He says it's unbecoming to my dignity as an officer and a gentleman to keep alley-catting around and it's high time I grew up. I guess I'm lucky that in this universe that 'don't ask, don't tell' crap was shot down in flames by the Chiefs of Staff before it ever became policy. Hammond was one of the ones giving evidence that if they got rid of all their gay and bi officers in the US army, navy, Air Force and marines, the armed services in the country would grind to a halt…" He darted another look at Daniel. "I don't have the clap or…anything, by the way. I was wild but I wasn't stupid and Doc Fraiser gives me another blood test every time I so much as wink at one of her nurses."

"I feel really inadequate now," Daniel admitted. "I've only slept with two people and they were both women." He pulled a face at the ceiling as if he suspected it of mocking his sexual experience.

O'Neill propped himself up one elbow to look down at him. Starlight from the window was bathing Daniel in a bluish light that did nothing to disguise the length of his eyelashes, or the sculpted line of his cheekbone, his hair a soft contrast to the clear cut lines of his profile. He felt his mouth go dry as he looked at Daniel's lips, hungering to taste them but determined not to break his vows so soon. "I feel kind of sleazy," he admitted. "It must be nice not to have all those…one night stands in your past."

Daniel gave him another sideways look, face unreadable. "It's damned boring and we both know it."

"You're not going to sulk because I've slept with more people than you, are you?"

Daniel wrinkled his nose. "I'm thinking about it."

"It's our wedding night!"

Daniel folded his arms. "I want a misspent youth."

"Why? You have me."

That did make him grin although he turned his head to try to hide it. O'Neill moved a little closer to him, feeling the heat of Daniel's naked body against his, bare thigh a fraction away from bare thigh, their loins not quite touching yet in danger of doing so if their interest should quicken. He saw Daniel's chest rise and fall and realized it was in answer to the look in his eyes. That calmed him at once, a mixture of shame and tenderness. The ink was barely dry on that marriage contract. The one, hastily changed by a scribe arriving at a run in answer to Bra'tac's imperious summons, that dealt with the first night of the new bonding, where the two lovers were originally intended to lie like 'brother and sister' yet in their version were to lie 'like brothers'. __For the passions of the body should never rule over it; should always be subject to the wishes of the heart and the mind. The contract is not binding to the lovers until the three nights have passed and both have proven each is worthy of the other, not the slaves of lust, nor blind to friendship and affection__. The archaic words had lodged with him, like pennies in a wishing well sinking into the silt. So he would lie with Daniel like a brother, warm him with his body, but not his passion, hold him with kindness, not with wanting, 'kiss him only on the eyes or else upon the brow…'

He felt a curious sense of calm sweep through him, a contentment as he realized he had nothing to prove; that nothing was expected of him here, except to be a little better than he had ever been before. 

"Are you cold?" he whispered.

Daniel was still looking at his face, trying to follow his thought process, a slight frown denting his forehead. "Yes," he admitted.

"Me too." O'Neill put his arms around him, gently tugging him a fraction closer and then their bodies were touching, a shock of warm skin, bare flesh, an electric instant when it seemed as if their groins must respond, and then Daniel exhaled and he breathed in the scent of his hair, and the moment was past. He held him, gingerly at first, and then very comfortably, as if he had done this many times before, and Daniel relaxed much faster than either of them had expected, pressing in against O'Neill's chest with a sigh of contentment. O'Neill could feel the knowledge sweeping through both of them that they were alive; they had not been separated; could feel the living warmth of one another. They could hear each other's heartbeat, feel the gust of one another's breath. As the night breeze flattened the candles to guttering smoke, the moon came out from behind a cloud and turned the room to silver.

***

So dear I love him, that with him all deaths  
I could endure, without him live no life.  
John Milton _Paradise Lost_ (bk. IX, l. 832)

III: Paradise Lost

 

Today was the first day when he had been able to dress himself without Jack hovering over him while he did it. There had also been the small luxury of being able to empty his bladder and bowels without Jack calling across to him every ten seconds to ask if he wanted any help. A part of him wondered if Jack had actually liked him being helpless, something in the man that needed to be needed going into overdrive when he'd had a genuine invalid under his sole care. This morning as he enjoyed being able to wipe his own ass for the first time in far too many days, he'd had a jolt of realization about the nature of those infinite possibilities being played out in those infinite mirror universes. In some of them Charlie had survived, brain damaged but breathing, and Jack had given up his job to look after him. He'd thought in the past that Jack would have hated that, fretted at those restraints on his freedom, but now he knew he would have preferred it to losing his child, would have made a career out of taking care of his altered son, would have told him stories on the off chance Charlie could hear and understand him, would have taken him to a beach like this and shown him the sea, told him how the sun came up in the morning, why the dog star shone the way it did. In another universe Sara and Jack were walking across the sands right now, pushing a wheelchair, the Air Force receding like a half-forgotten dream, and Jack was changed but contented, not repining every day because his child was brain-damaged, just grateful to have him at all. 

He'd learned that about Jack over the past few weeks, that Jack wanted those he cared about to live whatever, would fight to keep them breathing however barely they might seem to be clinging to life. There was a nurturing part of him that rarely got to see the light of day that found a purpose in feeding and cleaning and ministering to the sickly, a patience deeper than the Grand Canyon for those who truly needed him which lay just beneath the boredom which was triggered by five minutes of any subject that didn't rivet his attention from the start. Jack had always been like an archaeological wonder, simple as an old mastaba on the surface but, underneath, as complex as the burial chambers built by Ramases the Great to honor his fifty sons.

He'd asked Jack for a guided tour of the island, having to sound very firm on the subject before Jack decided he was still too weak and could only sit very quietly, shaded from the sun and out of the reach of low flying coconuts, before being spoon fed fish soup stuffed with more healing herbs than a witch's cauldron when the plague was in town. He'd made it clear he was very bored with lying down in the dark, thinking healing thoughts, and not exciting himself. He was ready to be dazzled by the brave new world in which they found themselves and promised not to keel over from the excitement if a wave was actually permitted to wash across the tips of his bare toes. Jack had compromised by saying he would give him a guided tour of the beach and Daniel, realizing that was the best offer he was going to get, had accepted.

"This wet blue stuff is the sea. This powdery stuff is called sand. The things with fins are called 'fish'. The big heavy thing that just narrowly avoided giving you a concussion is called a 'coconut' and…"

"Jack. When I said I wanted the guided tour. I didn't actually mean the kindergarten version."

O'Neill gave Daniel his best 'you astonish me' look. "You were in that damned shelter so long doing the dying thing I thought you might have forgotten the names of some of this stuff."

Daniel was so weak that walking was still difficult and involved a lot of leaning heavily on Jack or, as in the last few days when he had groped his way back to some kind of independence, leaning almost as heavily on a stick. The fact Jack had found him the stick had taken off some of the feeling of independence it gave him, as did the way Jack hovered by his elbow looking to grab him if he so much as swayed, but it had also given him a warm glow to go with his irritation. Now he gave Jack a level look then bent down to pluck something from the golden sands. He tested the weight of the smooth stone in his hand. "Oh look, a rock. See the rock. See Jack's head. See Jack duck…"

O'Neill gave him a grin of idiotic proportions. "You know you love me really."

Daniel returned his gaze and sighed. He let the stone fall to the sand with a dull thud. "You know I really do."

That was when Jack gently put his hands to each side of Daniel's face. Daniel closed his eyes and felt warm dry lips brush against his, his lips parted instinctively and a tongue slipped into his mouth, curling around his own tentatively. It was a very gentle kiss, but no one could have called it fraternal, platonic, or anything other than romantic. Daniel swayed and at once hands gripped his arms to hold him steady, but the kiss only deepened, a hand slipped to the back of his head to hold him still as the tongue explored his mouth more thoroughly. When it was finally withdrawn, Daniel opened his eyes to find Jack looking at him like a child who had just done something naughty and was afraid of being told off.

"I know what you think of me," Jack said hastily.

"You do?" Daniel was still swaying a little, everything zinging in confused reaction, his mouth still tingling from the feel of Jack's tongue, heart pounding, sweat gathering in a puddle in the hollow of his hands, his groin was stirring restlessly, wanting to be touched, his skin prickling with the need for contact.

"That I'm territorial. That I've made SG-1 my home turf and I don't want anyone trespassing. That every time it looks as if some outsider might stray over the boundary line I start staking a claim to the person they might look like carrying off. That it has to do with my own…comfort zone, not the people inside it."

Daniel raised his eyebrows. "That's what I think, is it?"

Jack nodded. "But that's not true."

Daniel shrugged. "I guess I was wrong again then."

"What I feel for you isn't to do with not wanting to lose a part of who I think I am, of the security of my team. It's to do with who you are. How I feel about you."

"Who have you been talking to?"

Jack pulled a face. "I had a couple of sessions with MacKenzie. Hammond was worried about my reaction to you and shit-head from the other dimension. He thought I needed some anger management counseling."

Daniel regarded him levelly. "I thought we'd already established that MacKenzie was a fuckwit?"

"That's not a word."

"So 'shit-head' is a word but 'fuckwit' isn't?"

"I was confused." Jack looked down at the sand in slight accusation, as if it had somehow contributed to his confusion. "After that business with the other…me." The grimace looked as if it was trying and failing not to turn into a snarl. Daniel could practically hear the sound of teeth gritting before Jack continued: "I didn't know what I wanted. What you wanted. What I wanted you to want. What…"

"Jack." Daniel grimaced in exasperation. "You suck at this."

Jack held up an accusing finger. "That's exactly what MacKenzie said."

"What else did he say?"

"That he thought our sessions should end."

"Why?" Daniel wondered idly if there would ever come a time when getting information from Jack didn't bring 'blood' and 'stones' quite so strongly to mind. On the other hand he'd been the one to stop him in full flow a moment ago. Why? Because he'd been afraid the man might be about to tell him something he didn't want to hear? The man had just kissed him, it was true. But he had never doubted that Jack had a libido, didn't take to celibacy well, or wouldn't be irritated enough about what the other Jack had done to Daniel not to want to try it himself, if only to prove to both of them that the other guy had nothing to offer Daniel that this Jack couldn't supply. If Jack had been a dog he would have spent half his life pissing on his own gatepost to keep off rivals, that was just the way he was.

"Because we were straying too close to 'don't ask, don't tell' territory."

Daniel found his heart was beating too fast again. "I told you he was a fuckwit."

Jack gave him a look of exasperation. "You're not helping."

"I'm scared." He softened it with a smile but he was afraid the panic in his eyes was betraying him. This mattered too much and he was too weak from his illness to deal with another disappointment, besides the sea was too loud and the sun was too bright and the beach was too sprinkled with remnants of crushed cliff-face ground to red powder in the golden sand.

Jack gave him that look which turned him to helpless mush, making him feel like some schoolboy with a crush, there had always been that knife edge in their relationship, the fear that if he ever let go he could find himself hero-worshipping a man whose ethics he wasn't even sure of, who could bury his goodness beneath a mask of military necessity, become voluntarily deaf to the voice of his own conscience. If Daniel ever let go they could both be lost, they couldn't afford to love each other absolutely, they fucked up too often, made too many mistakes, they had to be able to keep that critical distance between one another so they could call the other one on whichever mistake they were about to make next. As Jack took a step towards him, Daniel felt his critical distance dissolving like salt in the sea.

Jack's gaze was fixed on him unwaveringly, daring him to blink. "You're a brave guy, Daniel. Face the fear. Three days ago I told you I was in love with you. I'm still waiting for some kind of response."

"I can't think of a response that doesn't involve me looking like a guppy," Daniel protested. He could admit it only to himself, but the truth was the other Jack had hurt him. He'd tried not to get emotionally connected, fought against it, but still the man had come to represent a stability and affection to him he had felt he'd lost with his own Jack. When that had been withdrawn he'd felt emotionally raw and bereft. If he let go now he was going to go into freefall.

The sunlight was shining on the hairs on Jack's left arm, the sun-browned skin crisscrossed with scab-covered cuts, self-inflicted wounds. Daniel thought about the man doggedly cutting open his own skin, slapping down stinging leaves and burning pulp on open cut after open cut, not knowing if this one would give him blood poisoning or make his arm swell to the size of a watermelon, or only hurt like hell…

Hurt like hell… He'd thought sex with a man would be like that and the thought of it still made him simultaneously wince and shiver. Buggery. Sodomy. Anal intercourse. Someone should really come up with a prettier word for it. They told you it hurt, but it didn't, not really, not if you were drunk and your partner was skilful, too complex an act to explain to women, who wouldn't understand how difficult it was for a guy to be receptive, to be entered, or to a man who wouldn't understand why you would choose to take your pleasure that way. But it had made him feel alive in a way he couldn't explain, more in touch with his body than he'd ever been before, aware of every nerve ending, every cell. Giving himself up to the possibility of that pain, embracing the fear, relaxing into the initial discomfort, that lance of fire inside him, then finding the knife-edge of ecstasy that was the prostate-jangling reward for trust. He thought of himself in that hotel room, how it must have looked to Jack as he gazed through the window in shocked revulsion. Daniel jolting in time to the rhythm of another man's passion. It must have looked ugly even though it had felt so damned good at the time. He'd given that Jack everything the man wanted in the bedroom, too new to the experience to have an opinion about what he did and didn't like, so willing to be guided by the one of them who knew what he was doing. But he'd barely told him anything about himself, wriggled out of verbal intimacy while spreading his legs for any physical kind the guy wanted. 

The words came in a rush. "The other you broke up with me because he was in love with the Daniel in his dimension. He also said he couldn't deal with always being seen as second best." He wrenched his gaze from the ripple of the sea and made himself look into Jack's brown eyes. "He said I would never fall in love with him while I was so in love with you. He said that Jack O'Neills and Daniel Jacksons weren't meant to have sex without love. It unbalanced the cosmos."

Jack kept looking at him, face unreadable, and then something that looked like relief washed across his face. "Well, much as I hate to agree with that creep slime from the planet jerk-off, he was right."

"I see those anger management sessions really paid off."

"Dress it up any way you like, Daniel, the sonofabitch fucked you then dumped you. I don't like people who do that to my friends. Particularly not friends I love and who are in love with me, even if getting them to admit it is like pulling teeth."

Thinking for the hundredth time that Jack must have been at the back of the queue when the tact was being handed out, Daniel looked around the beach for inspiration. "We're stuck here together, just the two of us, possibly forever. What do we do if we have a relationship and then…break up? Divide up the island and never speak to each other again?"

Jack rolled his eyes. "Daniel, just cast your mind back over all the dumb, mean, unjust things you and I have said and done to one another over the past few years. Did it ever add up to more than a few days of yelling or sulking? You got over my punching you. I got over your pointing a gun at me. What are you planning to do to me in this place that is so horrible I could never get over it? And how the hell can we be unfaithful to one another when there's no one else around here except seagulls?"

Daniel held up his right hand. "There's always this guy."

Jack stepped forward and gazed into his eyes. "He may be good but I'm better."

Finding his throat was dry and his brain suddenly blood-drained, Daniel croaked, "Prove it."

The oddest expression washed across Jack's face, tender and excited all at once, a flicker of what might have been arousal so swiftly quelled. Then the man leaned forward and brushed his lips very gently across Daniel's. Not at all what he'd expected after such a challenge, warm lips just tantalizing his, then a tongue touching his lower lip, his mouth opening in response, fingers against his face, touching him so lightly, rough tips delicate against his skin. It frightened him to be treated like something so fragile, his own mortality briefly waltzing around them on the beach, Jack was kissing him like this because he'd almost died, kissing him so gently because he had become something precious and vulnerable that Jack was afraid to bruise, kissing him at all because nothing but near-death would have brought them to this point.

He felt a little dizzy abruptly, the sunlight, and the shore, and the music of the waves, the beach starting to tilt. He'd almost died. Worse, he'd almost been trapped forever in a friendship that could never advance in any direction, poisoning itself with frustration.

"I…" For a linguist he seemed to be suffering from a terrible shortage of words. "You… Me…"

Jack just said, "I know."

An instant later Jack was lowering him carefully to the sand before lying beside him. The sand was wet from the spray of the incoming tide and he felt it stick to his skin. It felt damp and warm at the same time. He felt the same way, a moistness between his legs, between his shoulder blades, prickling on his palms, the perspiration of anticipation, the precum of excitement. Hot and sticky and wet and willing. And scared. Much more frightened now than he had ever been with the other Jack, because nothing had been riding on that except that it might hurt, but this might rip his heart in two, this might do something terminal to their friendship, to lose Jack seemed suddenly so much worse than losing anything else, because if he lost Jack he would also lose himself.

A sudden spurt of panic made his heart clatter in his chest and then Jack's hand was stroking gently across his breastbone, as if his anxiety attack was an animal in need of soothing. "I know and I'm scared too."

Daniel said breathlessly, "Don't do it unless it's the right thing to do."

Jack was lying on his side beside him, looking at him with such intensity, such frank curiosity, reaching out to brush a lock of hair back from his forehead, looking at his eyes, his mouth, as if he had never seen him before, yet knew every line, every fleck, every flaw. "What would make it the wrong thing?"

Daniel felt tears sting salt against his eyes. The sun was too bright. The world was too unstable. The ground was rippling beneath him like a lion flexing its claws. "Anything that makes us…not…like each other any more." He couldn't say 'love': too presumptuous, too sentimental. 

Jack said, "I will always like you." And it made his heart squeeze tight in his chest because it was said with such softness and the look in Jack's eyes was full of love. Where had the look come from? And what had he done that it should be aimed at him?

He couldn't think of a response. His heart was pounding too fast with excitement, torn between anticipation and anxiety, wanting everything at once and afraid of taking some fatal misstep that would ruin everything forever. He could feel himself freezing into his usual passivity because things had just gone down an emotional byway he wasn't sure he could manage. This could be the beginning of something wonderful, or the end of their friendship. He was so afraid of screwing up, he didn't do anything, just lay there, breathing too fast and gazing up at Jack, like a deer in front of headlights. How was Jack ever going to see past the panic and immobility to the wanting beneath?

Jack reached out gently and touched his face, running a finger down his cheek, down his jaw, then slowly across his mouth. Daniel let the tip of his tongue flicker across his lips to touch the salt of Jack's fingertip, a tiny movement but at least something that spoke of encouragement. There was so much warmth in those brown eyes, such tenderness there. Jack bent his head very slowly and brushed his lips against Daniel's and the world went black for a moment as he closed his eyes, luxuriating in that dry pressure against his mouth. Jack's tongue lapped against his lips, delicate as a cat licking cream, and Daniel opened his mouth, felt the tongue slip between his lips, then the tips of their tongue touched, a strange metallic flavor to the contact which sent a thrill of reaction through him. Jack's fingers carded so gently through his hair, and the tongue probed deeper, wrapped around his own, and was then withdrawn. He reached for it, mouth straining after that stolen heat, but Jack was leaning up to kiss his brow, his eyelids, his cheekbone, then nuzzling at his ear, a wet warmth making him shiver with pleasure. Then kisses traced the line from his cheekbone to his jaw, lingered over his mouth in a brief, gentle but determined entrance by a questing tongue, his lips bruised so very tenderly, the warm cavern of his mouth explored. And then he couldn't suppress another shiver as a work-roughened hand slid up under his t-shirt and a thumb was brushed across his left nipple. It hardened at once and his back arched, but the deepening kiss kept him still, the other hand stroking across the smooth skin of his chest to soothe him, a wordless murmur from Jack of the kind one might use to gentle a flighty horse. Then the tongue slipped from his mouth and his ear was nuzzled again. 

"Can I touch you?"

Daniel started at the breathless murmur against his ear, back arching in automatic response. As he took one last look at the man asking the question he could feel the helplessness sweeping through him. He took in the silver-gray short-cropped hair which had once been brown, that he had touched on the Nox world, hesitant about doing so in case Jack bit his head off when he woke up. Back in the days when this moment seemed as remote and as impossible as harnessing the light from a shooting star. When he'd loved only Sha're, and Jack had been this guy he didn't know that well, who he took for granted, was often surprised and disappointed by, or surprised and impressed by, who seemed to have all the answers yet wouldn't always let Daniel ask the questions. Who didn't care about the interesting things, and yet always kept his eye on the important things. And there were the eyes, brown and haunted and capable of more warmth and kindness than anyone he had ever known. Eyes that could make him melt if they looked at him with tenderness and could make him bleed inside when they looked at him without liking. If he let go he was going to fall, and he wasn't going to stop falling. He was on the highwire now and he was losing his balance. He had to trust Jack to catch him and although there had been a time when trusting Jack had been as instinctive as breathing, now he wasn't sure, so much anger between them, so much coldness… He caught sight of the cuts on the man's arm again and realized that Jack had never let him fall. Even when they'd argued, even when there had been hostility between them, there had never been a time when Jack wouldn't have risked his life to save him, hadn't looked as if his world would end if he lost him. Abruptly every inch of his skin was prickling with wanting, needing to feel Jack's skin against his, taste his sweat, feel his warmth. He leaned in against the man trying to kiss him but a hand on his chest again gently stilled him. "Can I touch you?"

"Yes." He could barely get the word out, trying to sound deep-voiced and in control but speech escaping him in a breathless whisper.

The hand slid across his chest, so gentle on his skin, the friction of the roughened fingertips against his body making Daniel gasp even though they only traced faint circles on his chest, then abdomen. Jack kept kissing him behind the ear, nuzzling into the lobe, licking inside the ear in a way that made him shiver with longing, then another trail of gentle kisses down his face, to his mouth, while the fingers continued their lazy circles lower and lower.

Then – oh god – so warm, rough-skinned yet so gentle – fingers between his legs, then back to his abdomen, touching his thighs, a soft stroking of that vulnerable flesh, briefly cupping his balls. An incoherent gasp from his own throat. So hard, so treacherously hard. His face burned. Jack kissed his brow, like someone dispensing absolution, and then he realized that was what the man was doing, giving him permission to be aroused.

"It's okay…" The fingers stroked the inside of his thigh gently, circling on the soft flesh there. It was so long since anyone had touched him like that, had known him well enough to touch him like that.

He heard Jack's breath catch and realized he was aroused too. The man said again, "Can I touch you…?"

Even though he was already touching him, one hand brushing his stomach, the other stroking down his leg, Daniel nodded, gulped, managed a faint, "Yes…"

Wet heat closed around his cock. He moaned, arched, gasped. Suction, soft yet insistent, and fingers caressing his testicles, unbearable shivers of sensation, everything so strained and heated and trembling with need. A finger burrowed deep. He moaned again, loud but so swiftly swallowed by the sea. His testicles were kissed and sucked, and trembled in their sacs. Then his cock was licked, sucked again, taken in deep, and he was lost, it had been too long since he had known this, felt this, and this was Jack, how could it be Jack? Hands held his thighs down, Jack's hands, warm and so familiar, hands that had gentled him a hundred times before, yet never held him in just this way, firm yet gentle, and the suction greedy now, determined, swallowing him, his cock squeezed with painful pleasure. He was in Jack's mouth, that warmth and wetness, Jack's mouth. Impossible yet deliriously happening.

"This is a dream…" he managed. It made so much more sense as a dream. When he woke up he would be back at the SGC and he would feel so empty then because for one brief fantasy he had been given everything only to have it snatched from him as his eyes opened – 

Then Jack sucked him harder, held him down as he bucked, and felt that familiar prickling up the backs and fronts of his thighs, a pleasurable searing, from his balls halfway up his spine, before his body turned itself out, and he was swallowed whole.

He was noisy enough to make his throat burn and came around whimpering softly as if he had been hurt, to find Jack stroking his abdomen again, kissing his brow, his temple, inhaling the scent of his skin.

"You're alive," Jack said. "You're alive, Daniel." Then he pulled him in close to let Daniel gasp into his neck, eyes stinging with salt, Jack's body seeking his greedily, eager to let skin touch skin. He was kissed deep and passionately as the sea rolled over them, a shock of cold, but Jack barely paused in the midst of his kissing, tongue questing, eyes full of certainty. Daniel tasted himself in the other man's mouth, bitter and salty, leaning into the older man as the sea splashed against them, still shuddering with the aftermath of so much pleasure after so much pain, open mouthed in blind response, tongue flexing feebly as he tried to return each kiss with interest, full of ferocious love in his heart which his body was too weak to translate.

"You need to rest."

He made an incoherent noise denoting disagreement. Wanting to stay like this, with the sea shocking him with its coldness while Jack's kisses bruised and tantalized his mouth. But Jack was quietly persistent. "We can swing from the light fittings tomorrow," the man whispered in his ear, the warm breath making him shiver with longing. 

He tried to argue but Jack only kissed him again, deep and tender and swallowing all his breath. Daniel couldn't deny that he felt weak but would have argued that was Jack's fault for making him come, something that could only be remedied by some hair of the dog repeat prescription medicine. This time when they kissed, the sand stuck to their wet skin and wetter clothing, dusting their bodies with golden grains. Daniel melted into the kiss, into the dry heat of Jack's urgent mouth, realizing how exhausted he felt, the aftermath of being ill for so long abruptly catching up with him now the orgasm high was receding. He clung to Jack, eyes closed, kissing and kissing, hungry but weak. Where their bodies touched, they smeared wet sand upon one another, granular handprints left on their receptive skin, when they rolled together they left the faint barring of ribcages, like the shadows of old shipwrecks. Jack's kisses were almost unbearably tender, tiny nibbles behind Daniel's ear, down his cheekbone, along his jaw, a gentle nuzzling at his throat. He kissed his mouth again, then murmured again, "You need to rest now."

Daniel opened his eyes. "Think I can't keep up with you, old man?"

"I know you can't." Jack gave him a last kiss and then got to his feet. "Come on, Shrapnel Boy, let's get the sand out of any unpleasant crevices and then you can sleep."

Abruptly so dazed with tiredness he could barely walk, Daniel found himself hauled gently to his feet so that Jack could splash him with sea water in a way he found disturbingly erotic. He watched the man swilling out his briefs in the sea, the cotton floating on the blue-green water like a sleeping dove, then using them to wash him down, Daniel starting with the shock of the wet cloth down his thighs, between his legs, wiped delicately between the crack of his ass. Then Jack's wet arm was around his wet body and the man was helping him to stumble back along the beach. 

As Daniel saw the dark entrance to the shelter he felt a flinch of revulsion. Despite his bouts of delirium he had too vivid memories of waking in there to the darkness, body racked with pain, joints aching with fever, mind a swirl of bleeding color, like a freshly-painted mural ruined by rainfall. Too sharp a memory still of straining his ears to hear past the song of the sea, the cry of the gulls, some discernible proof that he was not alone in this place, Jack not lying dead or dying somewhere he was too weak to reach, every atom in his body focused on the first crunch of feet on sand.

"Not there," Jack breathed gently in his ear. "Now you're finally house-trained you get to sleep in the nice shelter, with the windows and the pretty view."

"What?" Daniel was being moved away from the shelter but his brain couldn't keep pace with them not entering that place, the sweat and urine-stained leafy darkness might be unpleasant to him but it was also the nearest thing to home. His body had already been geared up for imminent collapse, forward motion seemed almost impossible.

They were rounding a spit of jungle which had ventured further out onto the beach. He knew the lagoon was beyond this western curve because Jack had told him, but he hadn't seen it yet. He could hardly put one foot in front of the other, realizing that Jack might have a point about his invalid status, not that he had any intention of admitting it to the man. Jack held him up, his arm a comforting strength around Daniel's body, for once not complaining about the extra weight being put on his knees. 

And then he saw the lagoon, a sweep of dazzling blueness, curving into the land, the beach beside it even more golden, even more untouched, and there was another manmade shelter, much bigger than the one he had been sleeping in, the doorway up stairs he couldn't have managed until now, everything woven and plaited and tied in to canes of stout bamboo. He hardly had time to admire the workmanship before Jack was urging him up the stairs and into the large light room. Giving him a solid shove from behind to help him battle the gravity drag of those ladder steps. The woven rush floor was soft and springy beneath his feet and the walls felt warm and cool at the same time, a south breeze floating in from one window but the sweep of the north wind that gusted in from the sea held off by the tight weave of the walls.

He looked at Jack and saw a mixture of pride and apprehension on his face. Jack said tentatively, "Do you like it?"

Daniel noticed they seemed to be unconsciously undergoing a rite of passage whereby Jack turned into a hunter-gatherer and he was trapped in the role of blushing bride, now being shown around the shiny new home the Man had built for him. The only blessing was that Jack hadn't actually carried him over the threshold. But the anxiety in Jack's eyes as he looked quickly around the shelter, seeing good workmanship but afraid Daniel might see something he had missed, got to him in a way the more tender caresses might not. "I love it," he said gently. "It's the most beautiful home I've ever had, and you're much smarter than you look."

Jack grinned at him then, apprehension banished and somewhat smug lordly protector expression back in spades. "So are you."

Daniel said conversationally, "I need to fall down now."

Jack led him over to the corner and there, in the darkest place with no windows, away from the door, and the breeze, was a sleeping pallet of soft woven rushes, a space blanket lying on top of the rushes, another one folded in readiness for covering him. "You can fall down here."

At the sight of the bed, Daniel's knees evidently decided they could crumple, and the room spun alarmingly, then arms were wrapped around him and he was being lowered carefully to the bed. Then Jack whispered in his ear: "You can try falling all you like, Daniel, just don't expect me not to catch you. Not every O'Neill wants to just fuck and go." As Jack kissed him in what he seemed to be trying to make a farewell, Daniel hung onto him determinedly and after a brief resistance the man sighed and lay down with him.

"I have to – " 

"No." Daniel could be firm about that at any rate, and dug his fingers tighter into Jack's t-shirt. "You're not going anywhere."

Jack sighed, and curled his body around Daniel's, slipping one hand under Daniel's t-shirt to rest it on his abdomen, stroking his skin very gently in tiny circling motions. "Go to sleep."

Daniel had so many things he needed to say, whole sentences he had half constructed yet seemed to have lost the knack of saying aloud. But ultimately it was to do with having agreed to whatever it was they had been discussing earlier, a throwing in the towel of resistance, an acceptance that they were one now, and looking at the tender expression in Jack's eyes, feeling the comfortable confidence of those fingers so lightly stroking his skin, feeling that kiss against his ear, he guessed he had nothing to say that Jack didn't know already.

"You're really annoying sometimes," he mumbled.

Jack kissed him again, on the mouth this time, a claiming kiss that banished all further argument on whether or not they were now just good friends or undoubtedly lovers. "That's why you love me."

Despite the definite hint of smugness in Jack's voice, Daniel felt no need to argue with him. Closing his eyes, he slept and carried with him the scent and warmth and comfort of Air Force colonel into his dreams.

 

O'Neill wondered what it would have been like if this had happened back at the SGC. Closing his eyes he tried to picture a courtship played out there. It would have been exciting, the danger of it, eyes across a briefing room table and the sudden flare of last night's desire revisited in a reflected memory. He would have been smug and dangerous, predatory and insecure. He imagined himself prowling the corridors sizing up possible opposition, hostile and edgy, then imagined the way his pulse would flutter and his skin would prickle with anticipation as he knocked upon that door, trying in vain to keep that smile from his face. Daniel looking up and the laser exchange of their glance, Daniel trying to sound all adult and deep-voiced in case anyone in the corridor was listening. Trying to be casual but dropping his pen on the floor, spilling his coffee. As they got close enough they would have been driven wild by the other's scent and the lingering echoes of their own aromas not quite washed off by a hasty shower before work before that heedless scramble for their own cars, dazed by post-coital euphoria and too little sleep. When they kissed it would have been like two warring tribes meeting on neutral ground.

There would have been rules. He would probably have been the one that made them. All the things they couldn't do. Rules he would have broken the first time he was alone in an office with Daniel with his heart beating too fast and that eager flexing between his legs that refused to be denied. He imagined dropping to aching knees right then, right there, and taking him into his mouth to the root, sucking him dry, turning him inside out, wanting Daniel to scream his name while knowing all the time he had to hang onto his silence somehow. He thought of notes left under windscreen wipers for not-so-secret rendezvous. A lot of bad acting. Teal'c and Carter looking at them sideways, Teal'c asking him if he was annoyed in some way with Daniel Jackson as he overcompensated for the sappy grin he had to suppress by too much offhanded grunting.

Except…in four years of unconscious foreplay they'd never got there, not even once. Not even when drunk and restless after a mission gone wrong, even with their bodies thwanging from an adrenaline overload, they had always stayed on the platonic freeway, speeding down the path of friendship with no more than a glance at the exit ramp leading to romance. Why did people always think they'd reached some kind of plateau where in this moment, in this age, they had reached their peak of self-knowledge? He had thought there was nothing left for him to discover about himself even as he waded deeper and deeper into the waters of self-delusion. It had taken so much to bring them to this point: losing the friendship, losing the object of desire, another version of himself doing things he'd never known he wanted to do in that seedy motel room on another world, and then this, all these days and nights of thinking Daniel was dying and he was going to be left alone without him forever, having realized too late that without him he didn't even want to go on. How stupid was he, anyway?

"Jack…?"

How could it still excite him to hear Daniel say his name when Daniel had said his name so many times in so many ways over the years? Yet it did. His heart was beating a little faster just from that confused murmur.

He bent and kissed him, in the salt-flavored darkness of the cabin, inhaling Daniel's scent as he did so. He smelled of the sunwarmed sand and the salt of the sea, and of his own arousal and completion from their earlier encounter on the beach. He knew he shouldn't like it so much, the way Daniel reached for him like that, half asleep and drowsy, still weak from illness and so much not himself, yet he liked to be needed this much, a part of him aching with loneliness at all the friends that they had lost when they were marooned here, another part triumphant because there was only him now, he was all that Daniel had left, and therefore there was no risk of boredom or distraction. Well, not until Daniel began to explore that ruined temple, of course…

"Go back to sleep."

"We could have sex." Daniel pressed in against him and began to lap at his collarbone in a maddeningly persistent way.

"No." O'Neill felt a warm hand reach under his shirt and caress his chest, playing with the hair there, brushing so lightly across his nipples. Daniel had such beautiful hands, long-fingered, sensitive and…sneaky. He grabbed a wrist that was straying too far south. "You need your sleep."

"I'm too horny to sleep."

Typical post-near-death-experience hormonal overload. The body might think it was willing but in reality it was still much too weak. O'Neill kissed the tantalizing fingers before firmly placing Daniel's hand back on his chest and holding it there. "The more you rest, the stronger you'll get, the stronger you get the more chance there is that we can have sex." He gasped then as a face burrowed determinedly at his groin, even through the cloth of his pants he had felt that lick of wet warmth, his cock was unfurling like a flag about to fly up the pole. "Daniel!"

Daniel began to giggle, in the glints of starlight making their way through the rush walls, O'Neill saw his skin bathed blue, eyelashes absurdly long. "You sound so shocked."

"I am shocked." O'Neill had to fight not to kiss him hard then start groping him the way he wanted to, his body wrapped against Daniel's, skin against skin, fingers caressing everything, tongues intertwined like mating snakes. God, no thoughts like that or he'd never be able to resist him. "You're a bad archaeologist and you won't get any fossils to play with if you don't get your beauty sleep."

Daniel 'humphed' sulkily as he lay back down. "How long are you going to keep treating me like an invalid?"

"As long as you _are_ an invalid, Daniel." He couldn't help kissing him, not when his mouth was right there. Daniel purred him against him then, sweet and almost submissive, the way he absolutely never was when he was well, the proof right there he was probably still running a temperature, in the way he curled close, rubbing his cheek against O'Neill's stubble, groin seeking groin.

"I sleep much better after I've come," Daniel whispered in his ear. O'Neill couldn't deny that was true. Sighing, he reached into Daniel's shorts and cupped him gently. It still felt strange to be able to touch him like this, something forbidden he shouldn't really be doing. Daniel gasped in his ear and the hot breath was tantalizing. He felt the weight of his testicles in his hand and stroked them gently with his thumb, so vulnerable and soft against his skin. Daniel shivered and hardened, and he stroked his shaft then, rubbing his thumb over the weeping tip. As Daniel groaned and thrust into his hand, he couldn't help thinking of what he he'd seen through that motel window, Daniel with his head back and the sweat trickling down his chest, the other O'Neill's tongue chasing a stray droplet, then the pulsing energy of his thrusts, so deep and hard and – 

He was biting his lip too hard to object when Daniel's hand closed around his own aching erection. They pumped each other while he wrestled with demons of jealousy, anger and a lust that frightened him a little. Was it sane to want someone this much at his age? He wanted Daniel to moan and gasp and scream his name as he came and kept on coming, and he wanted to shoot his load in the velvet warmth within him, feel him tighten around him as Daniel came, as his body gave him everything, without borders or barriers or doubts or lies.

"Oh god…" It was too fast, ripped from him, a fleeting starburst of pleasure before he had shot his bolt. He breathed raggedly for a moment then recovered his rhythm, stroking Daniel hard and fast so he could come as well, and they could sleep. Daniel gasped something incoherent in Abydonian into his ear, hot fluid gushed over his fingers, and then the younger man was slumped against him, sweat-sheened and panting. O'Neill kissed him gently, soothing him with murmured reassurances and gentle fingers caressing his chest, and then whispered in his ear that Daniel should go to sleep now. Words wasted as he noticed that Daniel had drifted into slumber even before his chest stopped heaving. He lay down next to him, breathing hard himself, and despite their mutual stickiness, pulled him in close so he could feel for himself as he slept, Daniel's warm breath against his neck, and hear the constant rhythm of his heart.

Sooner or later he knew Daniel was going to want to see the temple and when he did he was probably going to realize what O'Neill was starting to suspect about why a place with a Stargate was now uninhabited, despite the fish and the fruit and the monkeys in the trees. Until then he thought they should enjoy every minute of every day in each other's company, and smile as they dreamed as they slept.

 

Daniel woke up very early in the morning, before the gulls began calling and when the sea had a pensive sound to its sweep up the beach, as if it was still pondering its dreams. He'd thought the ground had shifted underneath him, a far-off roar, and had imagined himself a deep sea swimmer for a few endless seconds of a nightmare in which he fled from a kraken that spewed tongues of flame. But reality was familiar and safe, especially the steady rhythm of Jack's breathing by his side. There was barely any light, just a pale glimmer to relieve the darkness, and he was still more asleep than awake, but neither his muzzy state nor not being able to see stopped Daniel thinking about giving Jack a blow job. He'd been cheated of that by Jack's unreasonableness, yet his mouth was still eager for that taste on waking. He still hurt a little, a soreness in his thigh, a numbness around his left hip, a deeper ache in his shoulder, but they were minor discomforts. He wasn't dying any more and his temperature was normal. He was also extremely horny and his body was prickling with anticipatory awareness of Jack being nearby, the scent of him in his nostrils, the sound of his breathing in his ears, the sense of his body heat close enough to touch.

Daniel rolled drowsily onto his side and found Jack lying on the pallet next to him. The night had been warm and Jack had thrown the space blanket onto Daniel's side of the pallet, where it was now tangled sweatily around Daniel's bare legs. Jack was buck naked, obviously having removed all his clothes in the night, and smelled faintly of seawater. Even in the faint early morning light, Daniel found he was licking his lips reflexively. He also thought that if Jack was just going to lie there next to him, naked, he should carry his portion of the blame for anything that might…ensue. The man's outline was grainy and monochrome in the darkness, but the bare skin did carry a faint gleam which led the eye from strong shoulders, through the soft fuzz of chest hair, narrow hips arrowing the eye irresistibly to that nestling of loins, a pale shaft just beginning to emerge from a dark curl of hair. He was pleased to see that one part of Jack had half-awoken before the rest of him. He could work with that. Sleepily, Daniel breathed on that appetizing-looking head and then began to suckle.

 

O'Neill woke with a gasp to find his now regular brain-melting dream about being given a blow job by Daniel wasn't fading this time, the sensation lingering, intensifying, the warm mouth around his shaft, skilful tongue exploring the slit of his head, suction, licking, deeper suction, deeper, deeper…

"Oh god…!" The reality on top of the dream was too much, pleasure building, peaking and spurting while he was only barely awake, then lay in the darkness, panting pleasurably. "Tell me I didn't just imagine that."

"Imagine what?" Daniel's lips were pressed to his then a tongue slipped inside his mouth which tasted unmistakably of his salty satisfaction.

O'Neill felt his groin give another twitch in response to that proof that Daniel had just swallowed his semen, just actively encouraged him to come in his mouth. He sucked on his tongue, arousal awakening now. That first response had been physical, blindly reactive, he wanted his mind and full array of erogenous zones engaged in the next bout. He put a hand on Daniel's shoulder, rolling him onto his back and himself on top of him, very comfortable about handling his body after all those days of doctoring. In his dreams, Daniel had always been oddly passive and when he'd tried to make some kind of analysis he'd supposed it was because he either couldn't fill in a response, or because in the only glimpses he'd ever got of Daniel with women or that O'Neill, he'd been pretty much sitting, standing, or lying there while the other person made all the moves. Now he realized his subconscious had actually been doing a pretty smart piece of analysis, because the plain fact was Daniel was more passive than not in bed. Having evidently used up all his initiative for the day in coming up with the idea of a blow job, Daniel let himself be rolled over onto his back and then waited to see what O'Neill was going to do next.

"Doctor Jackson," said O'Neill with mock-sternness. "Did you just molest me in my sleep?"

Daniel looked up at him and nothing could have been more innocent than that face. That was just the way Daniel had looked right after he'd batted his eyelashes at Arris Bock then looked for all the world as if ice cream wouldn't melt in his mouth on a summer day. "No. I would never do that."

"Are you lying?"

Daniel moistened his lips and looked up at the corner of the roof of the shelter as he considered the point. "Yes."

O'Neill stroked a hand down his abdomen, knowing he needed to pee before they got too up close and personal again, but wanting to make sure Daniel stayed focused. "How are you feeling this morning?"

Daniel gave him an under the eyelashes look that would have been utterly groin-hardening had it not made him look about twelve. "A little frisky."

Typical near-escape-from-death-reaction. O'Neill could rationalize it as that anyway. He hadn't been the only one who knew that Daniel was going to die and it was natural that the ex-patient should be feeling a little…celebratory. He was feeling pretty darned celebratory himself, but he was also very aware of how many stitches he had put in and then neatly snipped through again after a suitable ten-day interval.

O'Neill put a hand on Daniel's brow, feeling for fever, then lowered his head to examine for swelling around his wounds, examining his shoulder, then thigh, then hip. And the fact that in the process he had to put his face very close to Daniel's bare skin and that Daniel would then feel his warm breath on his body had nothing to do with what was an entirely professional examination. The way Daniel arched his back as Jack breathed on his groin, making an incoherent needy little gasp as he did so, had no effect on him either. Trying not to grin, O'Neill pretended a close interest in the healed wound on Daniel's thigh, touching the skin gently around the place while he continued to exhale on a now-rapidly hardening cock.

"Jack…please…"

O'Neill looked up at a squirming and erect Daniel in feigned surprise. "Something I can do for you, Daniel?"

Daniel gave him a narrow-eyed look. "Need I remind you there are only two of us on this island, so you either play nice with me or it's just you and your right hand when the sap is rising."

O'Neill breathed on the head of his cock again, grinning wider when he squirmed. "Who are you calling a sap?" Then he turned Daniel's retort into an incoherent moan as he licked the head of his cock, delicately at first, and then hungrily, before taking it into his mouth and starting to suck. He was aware of Daniel making a lot of noise, and grabbed him by the hips, holding him flat to the pallet so he wouldn't move around too much and open up any of his healing wounds. He sucked harder and Daniel bucked under his grip, back arching, hips jolting in his need to thrust. O'Neill tortured him sweetly. Sucking hard then pulling back for some leisurely mouthing of the head of his cock, slipping his tongue into the slit, running his tongue along the length of his shaft, mouthing the firm curve of his balls, pulling the slippery head back into his mouth again and beginning a slow deep sucking motion while his fingers stroked Daniel's perineum. He wasn't trying to bring Daniel off, he knew damned well how to get a guy to come from a blow-job, having been a guy coming from a blow-job many times in his life – although not enough, as it was one of those things, like your team winning, of which there could never be enough. He was just having fun turning Doctor Daniel Jackson of the too-active brain and too many degrees into a squirming mindless jelly. Only when Daniel's incoherence got so loud and so breathless that he seemed in danger of passing out, did O'Neill stop tantalizing him and begin to blow him in earnest. He had to hold him down harder as Daniel lunged underneath him, driven wild by not being able to thrust, but O'Neill sucked him to a slow sweet climax, not letting him rush, wanting him to enjoy every sensation. And was rewarded at last by a strangled sound from Daniel, like his name cried and then abruptly swallowed before completion, just as hot fluid hit the back of his throat. 

Despite his sense of a job well done in getting Daniel to Orgasm City by the scenic route, O'Neill's ears were still burning with the echoes of that half-choked name. Wiping a hand across the back of his mouth, he sat back and gave Daniel a look of enquiry. Still breathing hard, Daniel gave him a look of apology. "I…I meant to tell you before. I never called him 'Jack'."

O'Neill had a sudden recollection of Daniel and the other O'Neill in that corridor, him watching them and listening to them, aggrieved and a little alarmed at his own sense of exclusion, wondering why that asshole from the other dimension wasn't using Daniel's proper name. He blinked in confusion. "You mean you two went on calling each other by those dumb names even after you…?" He shook his head in confusion. "Why?"

"Because you're 'Jack'. I couldn't think of anyone else as 'Jack'. But I was afraid you might think…" 

Daniel grimaced at him and O'Neill thought not for the first time that for a guy who knew twenty-three different languages, Daniel sometimes had a lot of trouble making sense in any of them. He got what he'd just been told though. Daniel hadn't wanted to scream his name to the gods of climax when O'Neill wasn't sure which 'Jack' was being referred to. Which was considerate, certainly, but now he was thinking about the other O'Neill again. 

He rose to his feet. "I need to pee. Wait there." O'Neill pointed an imperious finger at him and strode out into the early dawn, ignoring Daniel's muttered 'Where else would I go?' with the skill of long practice. There were only a few gulls in the distance, scouring the sea for fish, the palms barely rustling as the first traces of pink and gold began to stain the sky. He peed into the sea, trying to dislodge the foam of the sluggish waves that made wet semi-circles on the smooth sand. His own little tribute to Canute.

He realized as he headed back for the cabin that he was too aware of his invisible rival, feeling the need to compete with someone who was effectively himself, unable to stop himself treating this seduction like a military campaign, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition. The other guy had been flirtatious and easy-going, charming Daniel into bed by making it seem to be no big deal, an experiment that might be fun, like smoking a joint or visiting a strip-joint. He didn't feel that way this morning. More like that Alexander guy Daniel was always blathering about, deciding to conquer a new country. He wondered if Janet Fraiser had been lying when she told him that too much testosterone production would erode vital braincells. Carter had nodded in agreement but there had been a smirking look about them that made him suspect they were having a Ya Ya Sisterhood moment. One witch by that cauldron in Scotland would probably just have told Macbeth to have a nice day.

"Jack…"

As he swung himself up the steps into their cabin, he found Daniel standing up with a space blanket knotted awkwardly around his waist. He was doing that fluttery thing with his hands, when he had a lot he wanted to say and the words weren't coming. Daniel bit his lip. "I love you."

"I know you do." O'Neill still wasn't convinced that standing around telling one another soppy stuff was really what he and Daniel should be doing. Of course they loved each other, they had been fighting like a cat and dog for years – with Daniel very definitely in the role of cat – waiting for the world to settle into the right slot whereby they got to this point. A place and a time where they could finally let go of all resistance and sink into sex and togetherness. He still drew the line at big romantic speeches though.

"No, I mean I love _you_." Daniel gave him one of those wincing, slightly embarrassed smiles. "As opposed to anyone else who you might think that I did. Love, I mean. As more than a friend."

O'Neill looked him up at down. Daniel was looking very nice indeed, despite the space blanket from which one long bare leg was visible in a truly enticing way. "Daniel, life's not a chick flick."

Daniel scrunched up his nose in a ridiculously cute way. "Meaning…?"

"There is no scene required where we tell each other lots of girl stuff about how we feel about each other. We just…demonstrate how we feel about each other."

Daniel moistened his lips. "I get you. Like your cutting into your own flesh to try to find a cure to save my life?"

"No." O'Neill waved a dismissive hand. "That's just…subtext."

"And text would be…?" A crease of confusion lined Daniel's forehead while O'Neill waited for him to get it. Daniel looked O'Neill up and down and then began to unknot the space blanket. A slow anticipatory smile spread across Daniel's face and his groin visibly twitched. He was clearly still in that 'didn't die therefore must have sex a lot' post-stress haze. "I think I get you." He let the space blanket fall to the floor.

O'Neill grinned. "I think you do."

 

Daniel had to remind himself that there had been a time when he had unquestioningly thought of himself as heterosexual because right now he spent far too much of his time hungering for the kind of sex he'd never known he even liked until a few months earlier. O'Neill had clearly opened one hell of a Pandora's Box where he was concerned, and much as he loved – and he did love – all the other exciting nighttime – and often daytime – things that he and Jack were getting today together in their beautiful new home, the thing he really wanted was being withheld from him.

For too many days now, their lovemaking had been so gentle he felt like a piece of porcelain in a glass case. Even when Jack's eyes promised the dark, dangerous, and passionate, all his body delivered was proof of the self-control that Air Force colonels had. Gentle kisses and caresses, Daniel being always expertly sucked or fingered to climax, never fucked, even when he was practically begging to be fucked, right here and right now, please, Jack, oh god, _please_ …

Jack's iron self-control didn't suit Daniel's mood, which was reckless with the relief of survival. He wanted them to do it over and over, hot and hard and sweaty and passionate, all caution thrown to the salt sea winds, while Jack had acted as if they'd implode if brought together with too much friction. At times Daniel swore he nearly burst into flames from sheer frustration. He loved Jack's kisses, loved too his skilful use of fingers and tongue to bring Daniel to climax. But he wanted to undermine the cabin foundations with the sheer animal passion of their lust for one another while Jack had him restricted to blow jobs, hand jobs, the gentlest of frottage and intercourse only of the inter crural variety. All enjoyable, certainly, and he'd been surprised to find how arousing it was to feel Jack's slicked member pushed between his tightened thighs, the friction of it between his legs, feeling Jack get harder, hearing him panting, feeling him come.

It was certainly a contrast to O'Neill, who, generally being a little pressed for time, always wanted to plunge his cock into something warm and tight and welcoming as many times as possible before they had to go their separate ways. He liked the weight and taste of this Jack's cock in his mouth, loved it when Jack pinned him gently to the bed and swirled his tongue around the head of Daniel's aching cock then swallowed him to the root. Loved the feel of Jack's callused fingers intimately exploring his body, then curling around his cock to make him come high and hard and loud. But it wasn't the same as being entered, that sensation of burning fullness, the weight and power of a cock thrust into its length, finding that buried gland inside him and releasing those licks of flame. He wondered if it was the memory of the other man penetrating him that was inhibiting Jack from wanting to do the same – except he knew Jack wanted it more than his doppelganger had ever done. He'd been a likeable conquest to the other man but he hadn't made his eyes burn with the desire he read in Jack's gaze. 

He just couldn't see the point in having a six foot two Air Force colonel of his very own if the man could never be persuaded to go a little Black Ops on him in the bedroom. After Daniel had tried to explain some of his frustration, offering to demonstrate with pictures if the man liked, Jack had said in a reluctantly impressed tone, "You're a bit of a slut on the quiet, aren't you, Doctor Jackson?"

Daniel rolled his eyes at the carefully woven ceiling. "I just know what I like."

"Which would be?"

Daniel whispered it in his ear, enunciating each breathed word carefully and had the satisfaction of seeing a cock Jack had insisted was done for the day hardening in immediate response. Jack looked at him in shocked admiration. "I take it back. You're more than a bit of a slut." But still nothing had come of it except another blowjob and how could he complain when Jack had just made him come yet again? When Jack was so considerate and passionate and selfless and skilful? But he wanted their bodies joined. Wanted Jack to want him in a way primal and basic. He wanted to feel the man come inside him, wanted him to lose all self-control.

It didn't seem to matter how many times he breathlessly pointed out that he was healed now, look, all there was left of his injuries was some scar tissue. He could sprint down the damned beach, turn cartwheels, handstands. What would it take to convince him? That was when Jack would just pull him into his arms and kiss him and breathe raggedly, "You nearly died, Daniel. You nearly fucking died." As if that was an answer, and even though it wasn't, it was somehow unanswerable.

 

They had spent many fruitless hours trying to mend the 'gate. They had prodded and poked at it, tried to work out how it had functioned in the first place and every time come to the conclusion that they had neither the tools nor the knowledge to fix it. Still, inevitably, they would go back to it, a puzzle they both knew they couldn't solve yet couldn't quite bring themselves to abandon. Even though it was obvious that the problem lay with some massive shortout in the 'gate itself caused by a power overload, they had tried fiddling with the DHD, moving crystals around and then panicking in case they forgot to put them back in the right order. Jack had tried getting the 'gate to turn manually, but it wasn't a case of just needing to find the juice when there was no juice to be found, the glyphs were blackened and Daniel suspected that even if someone had left a generator somewhere on the island fuelled by rocket grade naqada it wouldn't have helped. This Stargate was definitely not just pining for the fjords, and without the aid of someone who knew what they were doing even a direct lightning strike was not going to make it spin again.

It was impossible to give up though, when the only way home was through the 'gate and the 'gate was right there. It was a magnet for their attention and their energies, sapping their strength, feeding their frustration. When Jack threw a rock at the thing and called it a 'fucking alien piece of shit!' Daniel hadn't even offered any criticism. If he'd had any energy left to throw rocks he would probably have helped him. But that was the point when they had both had to acknowledge that they were probably never going home. They had slept in each other's arms that night, knowing this was it now, they only had each other, and if the other one should be lost, all that would be left to them was loneliness. Daniel still shivered inside when he thought of what that would be like.

Then this morning Jack had told him he had to take a provision-gathering trip, which Daniel wasn't fit enough for yet, and had refused to listen to any assurances that Daniel was more than ready to go anywhere and do anything that didn't involve fish-net-knotting or basket weaving. 

He spent a panicky day on the beach, imagining all kinds of things befalling the man, thinking about what it would be like to try to search for him in the tangle of that jungle, knowing with each failure to find him that Jack might be bleeding or dehydrating to death. It gave him a real taste of what it must have been like for Jack when Daniel had been dying, facing the reality of being left on this place alone. After three hours he was more than ready to concede that absence certainly did make the heart go fonder and he would really like Jack to come back now. He knew he should be grateful to have some time by himself, and perhaps that was the real reason for this day of separation, but he wasn't grateful, he was lonely and nervy and he missed Jack all the time, a marrow deep ache. 

Standing on the golden sand, he heard a far off rumble, and felt the ground shift under his feet a little restlessly, but it was still a shock when a freak wave shot up the beach with the unexpected ferocity of a crocodile and soaked him from head to foot. The simultaneous crack of one of the coconut pines abruptly tearing loose from its shallow roots and falling made him jump in panic. In that moment as he stumbled, unbalanced and dripping wet, the crash of the tree falling sending the ever-present monkeys fleeing shrieking for the dark protection of the jungle, the beach no longer felt safe or like home but just like a place where Jack wasn't. That was when he realized that somewhere over the last few weeks of their exile from everyone else he loved, Jack had become his home, and without him he was lost.

By the time Jack returned, a weary-looking silhouette on the far end of a dusk-darkened beach, Daniel was pretty much a basket case. His "Jack, where the _hell_ have you been?" made the parrots take wing in panic. Jack walked right up to him, gaze fixed unwaveringly on his face, and then as Daniel stood there, heart thumping with relief and indignation and even more relief, Jack put his hands to each side of Daniel's face and pulled him into a kiss that was so deep and so urgent, Daniel led him at once to the cabin without another word spoken. Even though he knew Jack ought to be exhausted, at the look in his eyes he took off his clothes without asking if the man wanted so much as a mouthful of water, yanking at Jack's clothes with the same urgency he could sense thrumming in the man's body. Jack pressed himself against Daniel as if he wanted every part of their skin to touch, kissed him deeper and harder than he ever had before. They landed on the pallet somehow with Daniel underneath and Daniel wrapped his legs around him, imprisoning him, Jack's hips a fleshy hardness bruising the inside of his thighs. He gazed into his eyes as they kissed and kissed but although he could read darkness there, and fear, he couldn't make sense of it. He stroked his chest, fingers soothing but thumbs automatically seeking the nipples that dwelt amongst the soft curls of graying hair. "What is it…?" he breathed. "What's wrong…?"

A tongue filled his mouth, deep and urgent, then was only reluctantly withdrawn to make way for husky speech: "Do you want to have sex?"

Jack's voice sounded ragged with exhaustion, but he kissed Daniel with passionate tenderness. Stubble scraped against Daniel's chin, a sweet abrasion, fingers brushed across his nipples, then a mouth bent to kiss them, to suck, bite softly. "Do you?" The warm breath against the sensitized nubs almost unbearably arousing, such stillness in Jack's body, no patience, the pause of a trigger before it was fired.

"Yes." Daniel felt his heart beating quicker, desire rising in him at once, an unquenchable flame. How long had it smoldered between them, waiting to be ignited, banked down with peat blocks of friendship that kept it quietly smoking? He bent his head to bite at the unshaven fur of Jack's neck, that place that made him shiver with longing when Daniel found it. There. Right there.

Jack moaned and it thrilled Daniel to hear it in his heart, and soul, and groin, that breathless sound of defeat and admittance. In that moment it was as if every Jack O'Neill was given to him, the one who had lost the will to live then found it again on Abydos, the one who had wandered around the SGC with his mind full of Ancient knowledge and such unreadable eyes, every smile and fragment of laughter, the man in the photographs even from before they'd met. He realized Jack had just given himself to him. No more disguise or subterfuge, not more masks worn, lies told, words twisted. It seemed only fair that he should return the compliment. 

He ran his hands through the grizzled hair and kissed Jack hungrily, working his tongue between the thin dry lips, capturing Jack's tongue in his then sucking it into his mouth in encouragement. He reached between Jack's legs and found him already hard but stroked him anyway, slow and tantalizing, using the rough skin of his thumb to make a more pleasurable friction that earned him a deep-throated growl that was by no means a warning. Then he slid down his body on the soft pallet and sucked, drinking in the scent of him, the taste of him, tongue swirling around the eager head, delving between the slit, wanting to summon passion and being rewarded with a salty ooze of precum. Another moan from Jack and his legs were already shaking. Daniel slid soothing hands up the back of his thighs as the man knelt over him, stroking him back to a point of control.

"Now…?" Jack breathed.

"Yes." Daniel lay back on the pallet and reached out with his legs to pull Jack closer. The man needed so little encouragement he practically fell on him, a tongue darting eagerly between his parted lips. Jack's tongue thrust into his mouth hungrily and Daniel sucked on it with equal enthusiasm, he was trying to hook his legs over Jack's shoulders and the man was doing nothing to stop him this time, kissing him hard and deep. 

He felt their stubble collide and realized he hadn't remembered to shave either, Jack's coarser than his, a prickly nap against his soft furring of tentative fair hairs. He thought of Jack shaving him while he slept in the dark shelter, the comfort of that blade scraping gently against his skin, all the intimacies they'd shared in the distant and recent past, but never this, not until now. Tongues intertwined, fingers reached, oil-slicked, the smell of almonds, sunblock, cold, a hiss as it touched, then fingers deft and gentle, so tentative as his body relaxed to meet them, then more confident, urgent, the kiss deeper, a moan from him into Jack's open mouth, something that sounded like another growl from the depths of Jack's chest. Scent of arousal and salt air and the restless sea and the baked-in aroma of skin with the sun on it too long. It was strange not to smell of coffee. Now they both tasted of the sea. Fingers scissored, a gasp from him as he felt himself stretch, that jolt of familiar pain, then Jack's breathing catching in his throat, a hardness touching his thigh, wet on the tip, eager, finally Jack was eager for this. Perhaps he always had been. 

Daniel reached for him, furrowing his fingers in his iron gray hair, pulling his head down, sucking his tongue into his mouth, feeling the lean hardness of Jack's body against his, wanting them to be one, dissolve together, like surf on sand. He broke the kiss reluctantly while his body underwent its own resistance, everything willing but not yet completely relaxed. Jack's breathing quick and harsh in the darkness, the way a stranger breathed, yet smelling only of himself, skin and sweat and the distant memory of gun oil. Daniel bit his neck as the fingers plunged deeper, finding that place Jack liked to feel worried with merciless teeth, while his body gave in at last, let itself be stretched into compliance. Jack's moan so loud above the background music of surf swelling against sand. "Too symbolic," Daniel gasped. "The tide's coming in."

Then he was arching as the head of Jack's cock touched, pressed, pushed, and entered, he was stretched and Jack was shaking with the effort of going slowly. He moaned and let his spine bend the way it wanted to, let his legs clench so there was no possibility of withdrawal, a slow miraculous pain inside him, sweat breaking out on his brow at which Jack bent swiftly to lap, his tongue warm and tender. He moaned again and let the back of his head touch the pallet while his body twisted, he wanted to be suspended in this instant forever, this slow advance, Jack's gradual capitulation to his desires. Then there was hot breath against his lips and he opened his mouth so their tongues could entwine again, while his body sucked Jack in deeper and deeper, both of them moaning into each other's mouths.

The first thrust was agonizingly slow, that long pull back, Jack too slick and him too tight for comfort at first, then a slow push forward which went into some part of him no one else had ever reached – just because it was Jack and he had wanted this for so long. It must have been an unconscious tension underneath the surface of their friendship for years, something that neither of them had never fully noticed or ever dared to look at in the daylight. Confused dreams forgotten as eyelids opened, tangled thoughts in the infirmary when the drip was pumping morphine into an aching vein. Another thrust a fraction faster than the first and he felt his body jolt and gasp with it, unable to decide if this was pain or pleasure, only knowing that it was wanted.

Jack kissed him breathlessly as he shifted his position and Daniel wondered in passing what this was doing to the older man's knees. Their tongues mumbled at one another clumsily as they tried to snatch oxygen as the pace of thrusts increased and Daniel's body relaxed in eager acceptance. Then it was as he remembered it, but better, so much better, at one with one another in a way he and the other Jack had never been. His mind had sometimes wandered then, but not now, nothing could have been more immediate than this and his body was tightening and flexing while Jack thrust with increasing passion, pumping him as he did so, callused hands skilful and considerate. He kept his eyes open this time although Jack's were closed, his forehead creased in concentration, that odd frown on his face he got during sex as if he was listening to far-off music. Daniel kept reaching up to kiss him, nibbling at his mouth while Jack responded blindly, mouth reaching for him while his body kept up its rhythmic thrusting. His arms were shaking with the effort of holding himself upright and Daniel had to admit he did like the fact Jack was the one doing all the work here while he lay back and had lightning bolts of pleasure jolt through him. The bulls-eyes to prostate were coming faster and harder, that starburst of tingling after each one, if the road to orgasm was a musical score each direct hit was taking him up another quaver. Jack groaning as Daniel's body embraced him rhythmically, the ecstatic jolt they both experienced at the end of each thrust. He felt the pleasure build from too many places at once, his breathlessly stroked cock, thighs, testicles, that buried gland inside him and now climbing up his spine. Was this tantric sex or would he need to be chanting for it to count?

The pleasure built unbearably to that place where he could never stay quite long enough and then a last thrust from Jack caused a prostate whiteout and he came loud and hard enough to frighten even the curious monkeys who always crept closer when the humans started to grunt and moan. Then he was like a feather floating from side to side, so gradually drifting back to earth as the aftershocks kept on tingling while Jack thrust harder and deeper, deeper and harder, Daniel's body jolting pleasurably as he came down slowly from his orgasm high. Jack was still stroking him he noticed, even though the man's hand was now wet with his come, brain locked into a place where he was determined not to be selfish however much he lost himself in sensation. Then Jack screwed up his face as if he was in pain and cried out Daniel's name as if he thought he was about to be snatched from him, hot semen gushed inside him and then Jack was lying heavily on his chest, ribs heaving.

Daniel kissed the top of his head and said, "It's okay." Not sure why he was offering reassurance instead of praise yet feeling that was what Jack needed. "It's okay."

Jack pulled out a little clumsily as his body stiffened up, cramped muscles belatedly voicing their displeasure at being so abused, then took Daniel's head in his semen spattered hands and gazed into his eyes. Daniel had no idea what the man was searching for, reassurance that he was still loved, that the sex had been as good for Daniel as it had been for him, or something else entirely. Whatever he was looking for he seemed to find as he kissed Daniel, gently, on the lips and said, "I missed you today. I missed you every minute I was away from you."

Afterwards Jack lay naked in his arms and Daniel found himself stroking his hair as if he was a dog in need of comfort, massaging his scalp, his shoulders, trying to ease the tension from the back of his neck. Jack gazed out of the doorway at the rhythm of the sea and said that he could have died on Abydos that first time, had thought that was what he wanted, for his part in the world to just stop, that he was grateful to have been given a second chance, grateful for the time he'd had since. He spoke in the way men did when they knew they were going to die soon and Daniel had felt his skin prickle with the chill evening breeze. He'd kissed him and said they should sleep now, but hours later when he'd woken again and looked at the man, Jack was still staring at the ocean as if waiting for the answer to a question no one had asked.

***

O'Neill wondered if the lectures might be about to end any time soon. He hadn't actually had a visit from the woman from social services who had arranged Daniel's last fostering, or Daniel's English teacher from seventh grade, but he thought that pretty much everyone else who had ever shown any interest in the safety and welfare of Doctor Daniel Jackson had been in to give him a lecture at some point. Hammond, who was usually an ally, had been pretty withering. For losing Casey he got sympathy, for letting one of his teammates get turned into a Tok'ra – again – he got understanding. For marrying Daniel he had gotten blown up like a stack of ammo.

"You _married_ Doctor Jackson…? Your teammate? Your _civilian_ teammate, who I entrusted to your care only after receiving assurances from you that you would not…"

"It wasn't a scam to get Daniel into bed, sir. I wanted to make a commitment."

"Like the commitment you made on Abydos to your wife?"

"I told her first. We got an annulment. By Ancient Egyptian law it just has to be decided by one or both of the parties… There's no stigma attached. It's not like infidelity…"

"Well, you certainly know all there is to know about infidelity, Colonel…!"

So it had gone on, for what had felt like hours, although commonsense dictated it couldn't have been more than forty minutes at the most. But it had been a comprehensive dressing down from a man who could not more clearly have registered his disapproval and disappointment. Hammond had told him categorically that he had thought better of him than this, had thought that even he would be aware of his responsibilities as an officer and gentleman, not to mention a mentor to Daniel in the strange new world into which O'Neill had brought him. Hammond had agreed to Daniel joining the team on O'Neill's request because he had been told he would be of service to the SGC, and Daniel had more than admirably fulfilled _his_ side of the bargain, however, at no point had Hammond realized that the SGC was now pimping for its officers. The possibility that O'Neill might actually love Daniel and intend to stick to his marriage vows like a limpet in a superglue factory clearly hadn't occurred to Hammond for an instant and no amount of assurances from O'Neill had made any impact. O'Neill had stumbled out of Hammond's office with his self-esteem down around his ankles, wondering if perhaps he had acted like a complete louse as Hammond had just told him, really had taken advantage of someone who trusted him. 

But when he closed his eyes, he remembered him and Daniel lying together in the darkness on the third night of their wedding, the night when permitted by law to consummate their union. The sweetness of their wine-flavored kisses, Daniel's deft fingers, the same fingers he had watched handling broken pottery so ably in the past, proving equally skilful at arousing him to hardness. 

His own intention of some gentle friction as a suitable consummation had been overruled by Daniel's hunger for some warrior initiation ceremony Daniel had read about on a wall somewhere that involved O'Neill imparting his wisdom and strength to him. O'Neill was so head over heels in love, happiness, and brain-fried delirium, not to mention fairly drunk, that he would have done anything Daniel wanted, including painting himself blue and sitting on his head all night, but he seriously doubted he had a lot of wisdom to impart, and given how weak he felt whenever Daniel smiled at him, he suspected his strength wasn't up to much either these days. "What exactly do I have to do…?" he asked warily, wondering if this was going to involve them getting out of their nice warm bed and tramping up some mountains singing native initiation songs. With Daniel you could never tell. 

Daniel gave him a smile that was deliciously naughty and stroked a hand down O'Neill's shaft again while gazing into his eyes. His words were breathed in a low, husky whisper that did extraordinary things to O'Neill's hormones: "You have to put this inside me and keep thrusting until you come. Only when you come am I properly initiated."

O'Neill's throat had gone dry as the sandpaper on the bottom of a birdcage. "Are you sure you read that wall right…? Are you certain this ritual isn't something to do with folk music?"

Another sphinx-like smile from Daniel that made him harden like sun-baked clay. "Didn't you agree to share all your worldly possessions with me?"

O'Neill had to swallow to speak. "I did."

Daniel's fingers tightened around his shaft. "I consider this a worldly possession, so…give."

He gave. Or rather Daniel had given of himself in a sweet sticky night of passionate, tender, and repeated pleasures. No doubt there were evangelists in Georgia who would have called it fornication, but it felt damned close to Paradise to him. Daniel was a little drunk from the special third-night-of-the-wedding-ceremony wine the kindly people of Chulak kept bringing them, any shyness lost somewhere around the second full goblet swallowed in record time. Consequently the enthusiasm and curiosity Daniel usually brought to investigating new cultural customs had been brought to this particular cultural custom with a lack of inhibition that he had found as surprising as it was welcome. 

He'd been very gentle and Daniel had been incredibly sweet, so full of trust for him and so eager that O'Neill had been the one who had to keep slowing things down. He kept his thrusts slow and gentle, making sure he stroked Daniel the whole time, gently encouraging him to relax into the rhythm. He was surprised and excited when he increased the pace to find that Daniel was so responsive, liked it more than he'd ever dared hope for, just the way he'd imagined it with that other Daniel but it had never quite been, Daniel moaning in mindless pleasure which grew more and more intense the harder and deeper O'Neill thrust. They both came together, howling like timber wolves, lean and sweaty and mussed with desire. They wrapped their arms and legs around one another and kissed hungrily, tongues dueling, rubbing their bodies against one another as they tried to keep the nerve-thrilling sensations going for a little longer. That was the point where he had to concede what Daniel had been telling him for a while: that his innocent little archaeologist was neither innocent nor little but was in fact all grown up.

As it was almost impossible to be embarrassed about being naked and sweaty with a man you had just had sex with, they had been completely relaxed with one another after that. After a brief sleep they had awoken sweaty, thirsty and horny. More passing backwards and forwards of the wine cask, a drunken stumble to the Chulakian shower (better than any Earth shower of his experience in having solid gold fittings and permanently hot water, say what you like about the Goa'uld, they really understood good plumbing), a drunken fumble _in_ the shower, before stumbling drunkenly back to the bed. Then they were going to places he had never been with any Daniel Jackson before, including a thorough exploration of the number 69. He and Daniel had been too busy trying to work their way through a mental Kama Sutra to stop and think about how easy they were both finding it to keep getting an erection, so it had taken a few hours before O'Neill realized the Chulakian 'wedding wine' was three parts aphrodisiac. 

After a few breathless hours, they lay on their backs panting, cocks aching from the results of so much pleasurable friction. He looked sideways at a chest-heaving Daniel and said, "It's always the quiet ones."

Daniel snatched a much-needed breath. "Teal'c warned me about men like you."

"What did he say?"

"That he knew well the soul of warriors and ones such as you were sleeping tigers. Once awoken they were always hungry."

O'Neill grimaced. "Does he watch a lot of Kung Fu films or something?" He reached for the wine cask and poured its contents straight into his mouth, but after a brief splash of thirst-quenching wetness, there were only a few drips. "I think we're out of wine." He looked back between them then at the tangle of semen-stained bed linen. "I also think we've just drunk about a quart of the Chulakian equivalent of Spanish fly."

"Well, if we did we're in good company. _Cantharis vesicatoria_ has been used as an aphrodisiac since Roman times. There's an African variety called _vuka-vuka_ which is…"

O'Neill leaned across to kiss him hard, growling in his chest as he did so, torn between annoyance that Daniel could start talking in Latin names at a time like this and relief that he was still so damned Daniel-like even when sweaty, naked, and liberally spattered with semen. "I know. I've used it. Bought some called 'squirrel jump' in a market in Hrare. Like gunpowder to the vital organs."

"Oh." For a moment Daniel looked nonplussed by the idea of someone actually having used an aphrodisiac he'd only read about, then he brightened. "So, you think we've been imbibing some cantharidin derivative for the past few hours?"

"Well, let's examine the evidence, Doctor Jackson. Can you usually get it up every ten minutes for hours at a time?"

"Perhaps we're just naturally athletic?" Daniel suggested. 

O'Neill pushed the empty wine cask with his foot and set it rocking, even finding the soft rhythmic thumping noise of red clay pottery on a rug-covered floor arousing in his present horny state. "I think it's to ensure the bride gets knocked up on the wedding night and they both come away convinced the other one is the best sex they've ever had."

Daniel looked at him sideways. "You are the best sex I've ever had."

"More to the point, you're the best sex _I've_ ever had, and that actually means something."

Daniel gave him a reproachful look. "Are you dissing my sexual experience, Colonel O'Neill?"

"Oh, come on, Daniel. I only have to be better than Betty Wilkins in the tenth grade who let you undo her bra strap and I win that particular prize."

Daniel rolled on top of him, whooshing the air out of him as he landed on his guts, and saying with mock ferocity: "There is no Betty Wilkins in my past, and just because not everyone in this room has been dropping his boxers for anyone who whistles for the past twenty years…"

O'Neill smothered the rest of his complaint with a kiss that was almost a tonsillectomy, rolled them both over so he was on top and found their cocks could duel as well as their tongues and with even more pleasurable results…

Okay, they had both been a little carried away and the next day had been hungover and walking funny, their cocks sore from too much friction, but they'd had a mind-blowingly good wedding night and try as he might to paint himself as the Evil Seducer of the Innocent Victim of his Unnatural Desires, what he remembered was two healthy adult males who were very much in love and having a damned good time.

In the infirmary, Janet Fraiser, who'd never liked him anyway, had treated him like a child molester, Makepeace had said, in front of witnesses, "I knew you were low, O'Neill, but I didn't think even you were that low", and even the guy who got the 'gate to spin had looked down his nose at him in passing. Kawalsky kept smirking about all the noise the two of them had made on their wedding night, and Ferretti was sulking fit to burst. He suspected he only hadn't gotten a lecture from Jacob because Jacob had been too busy bawling out Martouf. In fact Jacob had yelled at Martouf with so much vigor, Hammond had evidently felt he could afford to pat the Tok'ra on the shoulder and tell him that he was sure he had acted for the best. Carter blatantly playing fast and loose with the regs by getting a lot more up close and personal with one of their allies than was permitted by the rulebook had been pretty much overlooked, or possibly blamed on Khenera. Either way no one had said word one to _her_ about her doing Martouf for the whole of one extremely long and sweaty night after someone had delivered some of the Chulakian wedding wine to the wrong room. O'Neill half-wished he was a Tok'ra right now, if only because it would then give him someone else to blame for his decision to have sex with Daniel. It wasn't that he regretted having sex with Daniel, because he didn't, but he would have liked it if someone else could have shared the blame for it.

Daniel himself had pretty much danced into the SGC, eyes shining with happiness, smiling at everyone with blissful sweetness and so dazed with contentment that he'd taken vagueness to a whole new level. O'Neill had sat on the other side of the briefing room watching Daniel drop pencils on the floor, spill coffee, make a total pig's innards of trying to explain to General Hammond what had gone on after he'd been handed over to Teal'c for delivery to Heru'ur, and scatter sheets of barely coherent reports around the room like confetti. He'd known he must have it badly because his response had been to smirk at him dotingly whenever Daniel did something particularly ditzy.

Luckily, Teal'c had accompanied them to the SGC to ensure the strength of their future alliance and had taken in his stride Jacob smacking Martouf around the back of the head for either sleeping with his daughter or making her a Tok'ra, no one was quite sure which, Hammond referring to O'Neill with all the warmth and affection one usually reserved for a plague toxin, and Daniel's sudden inability to string a sentence together whenever O'Neill was in the room. O'Neill thought the real surprise was that Doctor Fraiser hadn't ordered a test to see if they were regressing, because he and Daniel were certainly blushing and stuttering like fourteen year olds, while Carter was sulking about her father's attitude like a teenager about to go out and buy an all-black wardrobe before wearing way too much eyeliner. Teal'c and Bra'tac had been quiet voices of sanity and Hammond had visibly brightened whenever they were the ones whose turn it was to speak. Teal'c had given a matter-of-fact and entirely coherent report of what had happened after his and Daniel's departure from the Chamber of Ra while Daniel nodded, licked the foam from the cappuccino Hammond had arranged for him to have, presumably to get over the hideous trauma of having sex with O'Neill, and said 'Oh yes, I forgot that bit' a lot.

Now, O'Neill was sitting in his office, dismally sorting out a backlog of paperwork and wondering if anyone was ever going to believe that his seducing Daniel wasn't actually a new low in his Bad Old Ways, but evidence of him turning over a New Leaf. Knowing he deserved all the lip curling and head shaking for his past behavior didn't really help as it just made the sting of injustice turn into a dull ache of self-hatred. These were the people who knew him best in the world, and they thought he was an amoral selfish bastard who never thought about anything except where his next fuck was coming from. They also thought he was about as suitable as a romantic partner for Daniel as they thought a wolf would make a good foster father for an orphan lamb. 

He could feel his self-confidence eroding at hitting such a blank wall of criticism. Had they all thought he was a worthless skunk for years for the way he treated his lovers? Had they been bitching about him in the canteen? Taking bets on how long it would be before he got Daniel drunk and charmed him into bed? Were they taking bets now on how long it would be before he was looking around for a new conquest? How could he explain that he had never felt like this before? This wasn't him kidding himself he was going to behave better this time, he never had kidded himself about that in the past, had never gone into a single relationship, including his marriage to Sha're, expecting or intending to stay faithful. But that didn't mean that if the intention had been there he wasn't capable of it. He hadn't cheated on the Daniel from the other dimension. Spiritually and emotionally he might have been falling in love with another person, but he hadn't pursued any other opportunities that had been presented to him within that period and hadn't found those temptations difficult to resist. As the guy was dimension-hopping to be with him, he'd felt the very least he could do was be physically faithful to him, and when he'd realized they were both being emotionally unfaithful to one another in a way too obvious for him to ignore, he'd taken action, ended things, kindly he hoped, although the hurt look in that Daniel's eyes did still haunt him a little. The guy had been important to him. Very important to him. In another world and another time, if there hadn't been the complication of the O'Neill in the other dimension and the Daniel in his, then, yes, he thought they could have made a go of things. But they had been born into different universes and weren't meant to be together. He loved the Daniel in his dimension in a way he had never loved anyone else in his long and checkered life. He wasn't interested in anyone else. Didn't want anyone else. For the first time in his life wanted to get old and crabby and arthritic with the person whose head had been next to his on the pillow this morning. He had never wanted that before. This was different. But there was no way of telling anyone that which would sound convincing. The only way to prove it was to live it, and to never, ever let Daniel down. All the same, it had hurt to discover that he was widely regarded as an immoral shit and he didn't think he was going to get over that any time soon.

 

O'Neill looked up at the knock on his door. He knew it couldn't be Daniel, as he was busy working on a translation SG-3 had brought back and playing with his new cappuccino machine. Given a few squirts of caffeine-flavored foam and some chicken scratchings on a wall even his legally bonded partner forgot he existed. Sighing, O'Neill said dully, "Come in."

At the sight of Hammond in the doorway, his heart sank. Another lecture about his selfishness and irresponsibility was no doubt imminent. Fraiser had already given him a dressing down about not using a condom on Chulak. As the only excuse he could have offered was that there hadn't been enough condoms being carried by both teams to have seen him and Daniel through their third wedding night celebration he'd been forced to sit there in depressed silence while she made his body fluids sound like toxic waste. When he'd feebly mentioned that the only sex he he'd had in the previous six months had been with a Daniel from a different dimension whose blood tests had been as clean as his own, she'd dismissed that as irrelevant. The implication seemed to be that so deep was his moral corruption it had probably turned his semen to sulfuric acid, and whatever its chemical content it should never be allowed to sully the innocent purity that was Daniel.

"Colonel…"

O'Neill nodded dully. "General." He pulled the report a little closer to make it look as if he'd been working on it rather than staring into space. "I haven't quite finished yet, sir."

"Don't worry about that now, Jack." 

The use of his first name made him look up in surprise. He'd assumed Hammond was going to cold-shoulder him forever. The man gave him a look of mingled exasperation and fondness. "I've spoken to Doctor Jackson."

"You have?" O'Neill couldn't keep the wistful note out of his voice. It was only two hours since he'd seen Daniel but it felt like an eternity. He tried to sound a little more like himself. "I suppose he was playing with his artifacts again? I've warned him about doing that in public." 

"He seems to have no perception that your behavior might meet with any criticism."

So they were getting straight back to that then? O'Neill winced. "He's an innocent guy."

"Yes, but neither Bra'tac nor Teal'c fit that description and they both also describe your behavior as 'honorable'."

"It felt that way at the time, sir, but I guess it really wasn't. I should never have let myself fall in love with a teammate. If you want me to resign…"

Hammond interrupted gently, "They told me Doctor Jackson was perfectly willing to sign a very different agreement."

Remembering the wording of the apprentice bonding, O'Neill felt a resurgence of indignation. "That boy has the sense of an egg plant sometimes. It wouldn't have entitled him to anything except a thick ear every time he forgot to call me 'master'. I don't know what he was thinking."

Hammond sat down. "I asked him that myself. His answer was that it didn't matter what wording he signed because he knew you would never hurt him or take advantage of him, or be unfaithful to him."

O'Neill found he was unexpectedly getting choked up. All his emotions still too close to the surface. "Told you he had no more sense than an egg plant."

"Master Bra'tac confirmed that you informed your wife of the change in your feelings. Teal'c told me that Doctor Jackson had told him that he was in love with you and had been for some time before you made your declaration. He declared himself contented with Doctor Jackson's choice of partner and said he had no doubt at all that you would treat him well."

"Did he mention that if I ever _don't_ treat Daniel well he'll pull off my arms and legs and feed my torso to wild dogs?"

For the first time the glimmer of a smile showed on Hammond's face. "I did get that impression. I also got the impression he didn't seem to think such…drastic measures would ever be necessary."

O'Neill met the older man's gaze. "No. They won't."

There was no hiding Hammond's smile now. "Major Kawalsky also tells me that you 'have it bad', and Captain Carter described you as 'pretty much putty in Daniel's hands'. Would you say that was a fair assessment, Colonel?"

O'Neill opened his mouth to make an indignant rebuttal, imagined Daniel in the room with him, passionate about some broken piece of pottery, waving it under his nose and telling him of course they had to investigate this further, didn't he comprehend the full significance of… He sighed. "Pretty fair, yes."

Hammond nodded. "Then I think I may have done you an injustice. And I apologize."

"Have you ever seen the film of A High Wind in Jamaica, General? At the end, the pirates get sentenced to death for a murder the little girl committed. Given the fact they've been murdering people for years and getting away with it, everyone, even the pirate leader, agrees that justice has been done. That's kind of how I feel about being called a selfish bastard for hooking up with Daniel."

"If it's any consolation, I think anyone who called you that in front of Doctor Jackson would get a fairly comprehensive rebuttal."

"Called Jack what?"

They both turned to see Daniel standing in the doorway. O'Neill felt his heart leap in his chest and although he tried to suppress it an embarrassingly goofy smile lit up his face. "Hey, Daniel…" Oh God, he was practically simpering and twirling his hair round his finger right now.

"Hey, Jack…"

Well, that was something. The look on Daniel's face could have lit up the dark side of the moon. Dopey infatuation looked so much cuter on him than it did on O'Neill though. Daniel gave him a smile that made him wonder idly if that was just happiness making his chest feel like that or if he was actually having a heart attack and ought to call for a medic. O'Neill tried to sound casual, "Need some help with a translation?"

"Not right now, Jack." Daniel held up a photograph of something faint and scratchy on a wall. "General, I'm glad I caught you here. I really think we need to investigate this planet, and I don't mean just stick our heads round the 'gate the way we usually do. I think this could be a find of unparalleled significance in…"

"Put it in a report, Doctor Jackson." Hammond hastily rose to his feet. "I'll be sure to give it my full attention."

"Oh." Daniel's mouth formed a perfect circle of surprise that made O'Neill's groin clench painfully. "I could tell you all about it now, if you like? I have slides."

"Let me read the report first." Hammond paused in the doorway and gave O'Neill a gentle nod. "Colonel."

"General." O'Neill felt warmed by his approval, realizing how much he hated being out of favor with Hammond. Then Daniel was sitting on his desk shoving a blurry photo of incomprehensible squiggles under his nose. "Look. Cuneiform. I think this is a lost Babylonian civilization. Isn't that incredible?"

"I don't know," O'Neill admitted. "You're sitting in too close proximity to me and I've now lost all capacity for rational thought. I remember you saying 'Oh' and then everything kind of blurred out on me."

Daniel looked at him sideways, clearly not sure if he was being mocked or not, then a pleased smile slid across his face which he hastily tried to suppress. "You really need to get out more, Jack. Your problem is you spend all day cooped up in an office doing paperwork when you should be having a life."

"You being an expert on having a life, of course?"

"I wasn't the one who passed out at the party on Chulak."

"Yes, you were," O'Neill reminded him. "After two beers."

"I did not!"

"Okay. Three beers."

Hammond gently closed the door and walked down the corridor smiling. If anyone was in danger of needing a life preserver thrown to him in this relationship it seemed to be Colonel O'Neill. He suspected the man's hair was going to be gray by the end of the year, but he had no doubt there would be compensations. Probably many compensations.

***

Daniel woke in the middle of the night, as he often woke these days, from a nightmare of the ground moving to the taste of Jack kissing him. The kisses were sweet but insistent, coaxing him into wakefulness in a way that couldn't be denied. 

Jack had been less talkative since that night when he'd finally given Daniel the sex he'd been waiting for, a look in his eyes Daniel didn't entirely understand, and any tentative requests for information were met with 'When you're better…' or 'You need to see this for yourself', but every night since then there had been the three a.m. fuck. The darkest hour before dawn waking from sweet kisses that turned into the kind of sex he'd only ever dreamed about, like free-falling without a safety net, sky diving without a parachute, sex as a dangerous sport in which if you hadn't pulled a muscle by the time the sun came up, you just weren't trying.

Now teeth tugged at his lower lip, then lips were pressed against his, coaxing and urging, a tongue asked for admittance as he fumbled towards full consciousness. The smell of Jack's sweat in his nostrils was immediately familiar and arousing. Outside he could hear the palm leaves rubbing against one another in the wind, the constant murmur of the sea. He felt Jack's stubble against his chin, a pleasurable friction, a hot tongue delving deeper, hungrier now. The same urgency he'd noticed last night and the night before. Just a reaction to them almost losing one another for good, he supposed, but it didn't seem to be getting any better with each passing day. Daniel stroked his hands down Jack's muscled torso, trying to soothe him, but Jack clasped his head in his hands to kiss him harder, making Daniel's chances of analyzing his motivation recede from unlikely to impossible. One place where he had no concerns about letting Jack take charge was in the bedroom, if the guy wanted to swing from the non-existent light-fittings or experiment with any position he liked, Daniel was okay about it. This definitely constituted one of the areas where they shared total trust. 

All the same, Jack's urgency of late could be a little breath-stealing. Not just the way his kisses plunged in so deep and so hard, but the way he seemed ready for action at the flutter of a space blanket, the sniff of a response from Daniel and Jack was hard in a moment. 

Daniel had to pull away to snatch some air, their tongues reluctant to part company, Jack's stubble grazing against his cheek. Jack was breathing quickly, warm breath tantalizing Daniel's ear. Daniel was still trying to restock on oxygen when Jack was sucking at his neck, body pushing up against Daniel in invitation and encouragement, hard cock calling to still soft cock, warm skin rubbed against his. Daniel felt his body responding at once to Jack's arousal, gasping as the suck turned to a bite that jangled straight through his nerve-endings, a callused hand moving between his legs, curled fingers dragged up his shaft, stroking him to hardness. Jack kissed him hard on the mouth, tongue plunging in deep, stealing his breath again, and then teeth fastened on his pulse point in earnest, making his back arch, making him moan. That was his hot button, that knife-edge between pain and pleasure. That was what turned him to a sweaty, shuddering puddle of brain-fried lust. He'd never got there before, because he'd never trusted anyone enough to let this happen. With the other Jack he'd had very enjoyable sex but they had always been aware of the briefness of their acquaintance and it had inhibited the taking of liberties. With Jack there was no such problem.

He rolled over onto his hands and knees, partly because it drove Jack crazy when he assumed that particular position, and also because he still had friction burns on his back from their lovemaking of the night before. It was surprising how abrasive woven grass material could be against the skin even through the thin protection of a space blanket. The friction burns on his knees were pretty much healed now, Jack had licked them to soothe away the sting, kissing them better in a way that had pretty much blown his mind. 

Now Jack wrapped himself around him, the fuzz of his chest a soft warmth against Daniel's tender back, and began to nuzzle at his neck and ear. His breath was hot and it made Daniel shiver with longing. Jack nipped at his ear, then began to whisper how much he needed this, what it did to him when Daniel wanted this as much as he did, how incredible it was that they'd found one another… The sentences were disjointed, the words confused, but the meaning was clear enough. They'd made love only a few hours ago, just before they went to sleep, so there was no need for preparation, but it still felt sexier when they did it like this, reckless and wild, no fumbling for lubricants, either the natural ones they were experimenting with or the last dregs of sunblock squeezed from their equipment, just this spontaneous, passionate, joining of bodies. Jack was still whispering hotly in his ear as he entered Daniel with one urgent flex of the hips. Daniel gasped as he was stretched, a shiver of pain through his body as he was filled so completely, sweat trickling down his face, bending his head so Jack could love-bite the back of his neck. Jack was already thrusting and Daniel's body jolted to the rhythm of it, excited by the urgency but confused by it as well. It was difficult to think coherently when lightning bolts of pleasure were thrumming through one's prostate, but Jack was acting as if every time could be the last time, the need in him evident in every groan of desire, every jerk of his hips, the way he kissed and nibbled at Daniel's ears and neck, words panting from him in between groans, growls and moans of desire:

"…you do know it's not the thought of… never having sex again… it's the thought of never making love to _you_ again… so much wasted time… days and weeks and months and years… what was I thinking, Daniel…? What was I thinking…?"

Even if Daniel could have thought of a response, speech was impossible. He was breathless from Jack's thrusts, and the blood his brain urgently needed was now all settled into his aching erection. An erection Jack would torture him by not touching when they were in this kind of frenzied mode because after fucking Daniel through the mattress he then wanted to fall on his cock and suck it to climax like he hadn't eaten for a week.

Jack was biting his shoulder, then putting all his weight on one arm to use his left hand to card fingers through Daniel's hair, pulling his head back, mouthing his neck, kissing his lips. Daniel panting dazedly into his open mouth, trying to lock tongues the way Jack wanted but too in need of oxygen while his body was shoved inexorably towards the woven cabin wall from the force of Jack's thrusts. Jack kissed him hungrily, sucking on Daniel's tongue, then thrusting his own into Daniel's mouth, a hand to the back of his head to keep the kisses deep, and all the while hips moving urgently, breathless and sweating with the energy he was exerting to drive his cock fast and hard into Daniel over and over again.

"Jack…please… touch me…"

"Not yet…"

They were slick with sweat, the back of his thighs and the front of Jack's legs slippery with it, Jack's chest hair wet with it, Daniel's back oiled with it. It was unsustainable, this pace, this level of passion. Daniel was breathless from being pounded by Jack's increasingly frenzied thrusts, held on the brink of orgasm, rocking on it like a feather balanced on an upturned sliver of glass. Each jolt of Jack's cock inside him was like a current from his prostate to every other erogenous zone in his body, he felt as if his veins were crackling with pure electricity. Jack's grunts as he thrust were coming so close together it had turned into one incoherent animal sound, Daniel was moaning, a low needy plea for something he couldn't have identified, Jack to stop, Jack to never stop, Jack to touch him, not touch him so he'd stay just like this with the climax almost on him but not quite spinning him under its final wave. It was like being at the vortex of a hurricane, sensations swirling all around him in a flurry of Jack's groans, grunts, and thrusts. His knees were being ground into the pallet again, his arms shaking with the effort of holding himself up against the onslaught of Jack's overwhelming need. Every cell in his body was screaming with brain-fried lust, his cock aching for release.

"God… Daniel… Stay…!"

Jack came with a last thrust then collapsed on top of him, hips still jerking as he wrapped his arms around him, Daniel automatically tightening around his cock as it spurted semen in burst after burst, a jet of hot fluid making Daniel moan with pleasure. Jack pulled them over sideways, panting into Daniel's ear, then craning his neck to find his mouth. They were both too breathless for kisses but Jack kissed him anyway, snatching a breath then pressing his lips against Daniel's, trying to suck on his tongue.

"Jack…?" Daniel twisted round to look at him, concerned despite his mind-blurring desire. It was as if nothing got Jack to where he needed to be any more, however hard and often they tried, they always seemed to fall short. Jack was stroking Daniel's short hair back from his face, kissing him again as he snatched a few more mouthfuls of oxygen, over and over, mouth tender against his, lips so sensitive, tongue needing to wrap itself around Daniel's.

"What's wrong?" Daniel breathed.

"Nothing."

Daniel winced a little as the spent shaft slipped out of him. He was sore, too much of a good thing. His erection was still aching though and he gasped as Jack grasped it and began to fondle it, thumb playing with the tip before fingers cupped it and began to slide up and down. Then felt Jack's soft cock slip between the crack of his buttocks, slowly rubbed up and down between them, smearing spilled come down between his buttocks, across his perineum. He liked that a lot, just as he liked it hard and passionate, and slow and tender, and fast and sexy, and leisurely and loving, liked Jack to whisper in his ear, kiss him just like this, liked to be woken with caresses, liked every single thing Jack had been doing to his body and his erogenous zones for the past few weeks… But sometimes when you were being fed caviar and champagne every day you started hungering for a little beefsteak and beer, or even dry bread and water, overdosed on pleasure even orphans could start to hunger for a little honest neglect. 

Daniel spoke rapidly before the stroking of his shaft turned him to a mindless jelly. "Is it the other Jack? Are you trying to prove you're better? Because if so, trust me, you're better."

Jack kissed him again then breathed in his ear: "I'm trying to make up for lost time I can never get back. I'm trying to prove that we're alive. I'm trying not to think about anything except this minute, this second, just…now and nothing else. No past and no future, just the present." With each panted few words he was rubbing his hand up and down Daniel's shaft, but although it was enough for Daniel it clearly wasn't enough for Jack. He pulled away abruptly, catching hold of Daniel's thighs, pulling him down the pallet and closing his mouth over Daniel's erection, sucking hard.

Daniel bucked, back arching, unable to recapture the balance he'd been clawing for. He had questions he needed to ask, thoughts he needed to think, but… hot wet suction on his aching cock, deeper, harder, so warm, tongue in his slit, underneath, teeth grating across the head… sucking, so deep, so fucking deep… ohgod ohgod ohgod… whiteness… blackness… silence…

"Daniel…?"

He woke with a jolt to find his face being lightly slapped.

"Danny…!"

"Ow! Jack, cut it out." He waved a hand ineffectually in the man's general direction. "I was dreaming about us doing really good stuff."

"You passed out!"

"We were under a waterfall."

Jack stared at him in disbelief. "Daniel, you were unconscious for two seconds. At the most."

Daniel raised his eyebrows at him. "So, why were you panicking then?"

Jack looked a little embarrassed. "I thought I'd kind of…killed you."

"Hell of a way to go. And it would look good on my tombstone: 'Died of a surfeit of pleasure'. Much better than lampreys."

Jack gave his head a shake as if trying to get water out of his ears. "I don't know what lampreys are and I don't want to."

Daniel moistened his lips. "Are you going to tell me what's up now? You know, as for once neither of us is? And for future reference, they're a kind of fish and King Henry the First – son of William the Conqueror – was supposed to have died from eating too many of them."

Jack stared at him blankly for a moment. "I really want some fish now. I can't back go to sleep until I've eaten. That's your fault. You and your damned history lessons."

It was the most normal Jack had sounded in days and Daniel grinned with the relief. "You don't think you making like a bunny on Dexedrine has anything to do with giving you that appetite?"

"Nah." Jack wrinkled his nose. "That would never do it. Do you want fish…?"

 

They ate their grilled fish on the beach to a backdrop of the ocean rolling in, their hair dampened with spray, the campfire roaring, spitting sparks into the darkness. The fish was too hot and oozed oil which crackled blue-green when it fell into the flames. They ate it from pointed sticks, even though they still had cutlery left, just because they were castaways on an island and pointed sticks felt de rigueur. Daniel hadn't bothered to dress, just wrapping the space blanket around himself, but Jack had pulled on his pants, his chest hair still shiny with sweat, the droplets turned to bronze by the firelight. Daniel knew there would be two fires reflected on his spectacles but he hoped Jack could also see his eyes. It felt as if that was important given that they really needed to talk. He'd thought Jack would take some coaxing, but the man started speaking without needing any prompting in the end, shrugging as he did so, like someone laying down a burden he'd carried for far too long.

"If you climb to the top of this cliff…" He pointed with his stick, the skewered fish-flesh adding emphasis to the direction. "You can see the sea."

"I can see the sea from here." Daniel licked fish oil from his fingers, thinking idly that however good this meal might be for Jack's arthritis he doubted it was going to make up for the damage the man must have just done to his knees. "It's the big wet thing right in front of us."

Jack gave him a level look and continued evenly: "We're in a bay, the rocks out there break up the waves. By the time they reach us they're pretty much tamed, but beyond the bay it's a rough sea. And there are sharks. Lots of them. I think they're following the tuna. I saw shoals jumping. Their fins shone in the sunlight. It was really something." He smiled then, but it was a sad smile. "So we can build a raft and we can give it a shot if you want to. I'd rather do that than just wait here."

Daniel felt the kind of chill travel through him that no external heat could touch. Not even a roaring campfire of palm tree branches spitting sparks into the darkness a few feet from where he sat. "Wait here for what?"

"This isn't an island, it's a volcano. And it's building up to erupt."

Jack looked peaceful after he said it aloud. As he let the fish slide from his stick almost unnoticed, only vaguely aware of it even when its hot scales landed on his bare foot, Daniel noticed that there was a kind of acceptance about the man that hadn't been there before. Perhaps he'd finally given in to the reality he'd been denying for the past few weeks.

Daniel said idiotically, "But it's so beautiful."

Jack gave him a smile of tender regret. "You're a lot better at the mythology stuff than I am, but I think that's what it says on the temple. That it's too beautiful here for mankind. Because we always screw up somehow and get cast out. There's a tree you're not supposed to take the fruit from. One with a snake around it. If you do apparently the volcano erupts. I didn't really get the fine print to be honest, but there were pictures of a guy taking fruit from a tree and then pictures of a volcano blowing its stack and them running for the 'gate."

They turned and looked at the 'gate together, as if it should somehow have miraculously healed itself, just because it was now so urgently needed.

"Another Eden variant." Daniel dragged his gaze from the useless 'gate and looked around at the beach, the rustling and fluttering of the palm leaves in the darkness. "It doesn't feel like a place about to blow up."

"No, on the outer rim it's fine. But in the center it's starting to heat up. A few days ago when I went to the temple the lake there was bubbling. I smelled sulfur, and the birds are leaving." He shrugged. "We could have years. These things sometimes have a lot of false alarms. Look at Yellowstone. But… I did take fruit from the tree with the snake on it."

"It will be symbolic," Daniel said automatically. "Not one fruit or one tree, just a warning about sustainable resources, not eating more than can be renewed. Not cutting down every tree when you're a fishing culture or you won't be able to make boats. Like Easter Island." He looked along the beach, the sand looking white in the darkness, the rush of foam as it flowed onto the beach shining in the starlight. "What about the monkeys? If it erupts on a regular basis and there isn't another island within swimming distance, how can there be monkeys?"

"I wondered about that too. Maybe there are parts of the island the lava doesn't reach. The wildlife takes cover there until the lava cools. The plants cover it eventually, put down new undergrowth. In a few hundred years the volcano is covered in trees again."

"So there's a hope we could stay here?"

Jack grimaced. "Daniel, when Mount St Helens went up there were people who'd gone to photograph it who couldn't outrun it, and they had cars and the scientists' reports to give them a head start. There's no way of telling which way this thing is going to blow, not when or in which direction. Some of the monkeys survive because they aren't in the bit that gets covered in molten lava but I bet a lot of them die."

Daniel winced as he realized he'd just scalded his foot and not even noticed in his bodily numbness. "Animals are supposed to have an instinct for these things. We could follow the troupe who live by the beach when they start to head away."

"What if they don't? What if they sit there with no idea it's going to happen until it does? What if we follow them and they're wrong?"

Daniel looked back at the sea, imagining the waves against the breakers, the slow circle of dorsal fins leaving an arrow-shaped ripple in the waters, a triangle of blackness against a grainier darkness when the moon went behind a cloud. "I'm not a good sailor. I read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner too young."

"We're not going to kill any albatrosses." Jack forced a smile that wouldn't have convinced a five year old. "And I do have a gun. Put a bullet in a shark and the other sharks will eat it instead of us."

"What if there's nothing out there except ocean?"

"There must be land somewhere."

"Why must there?"

Daniel looked down the beach, feeling his skin all goose bumps from the night breeze despite the campfire. The sea was still rolling in relentlessly, unmoved by the prospect of eruption. Last time it must have blown the other way, the side of the island neither of them had reached yet, there were no geological signs of a lava flow here. Perhaps it would do the same next time. Or perhaps it was now their turn. Death by fire or water. He'd been caught between those possibilities before, the water of reality, the fire in Jack's false memory. Abandoned on the ocean floor, prisoner of an alien, because of bubbles and flames and a belief that he was already dead.

He wriggled his seared foot out from underneath the cooling lump of fish. "Let's go to bed."

As they went back into the cabin, the smell of semen filled his nostrils and with it the scent of Jack's urgency, his fear of losing everything that mattered to him just as he'd found it again. "Whatever happens we'll be together." Daniel found a smile with difficulty, still feeling chilled to the marrow, imagining the heat of the lava burning through their skin, seeing Jack charred to a skeleton in front of him. Or the two of them parched and salt-blistered by the relentless beat of the sky and sea and surrounded by water they could never drink. Gazing at one another wretchedly across the sun-seared deck of some disintegrating raft, tongues swelling, skin peeling, wondering which of them was going to be left alone when the first of them died. 

This time when they clung to one another in the bed, it was for warmth and comfort, Daniel rubbing his face against the soft fuzz of Jack's chest hair, breathing in the man's scent as if it were a garland of lilies. Jack put his arms around him and held him close, kissing the top of his head and saying his name softly, like an incantation to ward off evil, while the ocean washed up to their campfire and turned its burning timbers to defeated coils of smoke.

***

General George Hammond read his way through the last report for the third time. Or was it the fourth time? If there were clues in it, he couldn't find them. He had never been someone who looked for patterns in the cosmos until he'd found himself reading a note written to his present self by a future version. He'd had an unfair advantage over O'Neill from the outset, knowing he must be lying about Jackson because twenty-eight years before he had seen Jackson in O'Neill's company, large as life and twice as natural, so the man couldn't have died on Abydos the way O'Neill had reported. Then there had been his knowledge that Teal'c was downright destined to be on SG-1. That hadn't been something he could share with Washington when they were pressing for Teal'c to be treated as a hostile alien and the only information he could give them in the Jaffa's defense were his recent actions and O'Neill's absolute conviction that the man was trustworthy. He and O'Neill had held several conferences in his office in the small hours when there was no one else around, O'Neill thinking that what he was doing was trying to talk Hammond into letting Teal'c and Doctor Jackson join SG-1, when what was really happening was Hammond having O'Neill help him rehearse the reasons he was going to be giving to the Pentagon to explain his determination to do just that. But he'd always felt the timeline he'd glimpsed was a fragile thing, a thin skin around the present, all-too-easily torn. When he'd thought Jackson was lost on P3Y-549 it had felt as if not only SG-1's present had been ripped apart, but their anchor to the future as well. Now everything could never be the way it was supposed to, a new beginning but all it had felt like was an ending. 

He remembered the way O'Neill had been with Doctor Jackson after they'd got him back from the dead, so gentle with him on-world, apparently snappy with him off-world as an owner whose dog had recently run off and got hit by a car. Daniel had never taken well to being given orders, Hammond had no doubt there had been an element of sulking involved in his straying into that other universe on the first occasion it had happened, and an element of O'Neill's over-protectiveness making him brusque also. After that, O'Neill had tended to put up with anything Doctor Jackson did with a resigned shrug, he knew what losing him felt like and it hurt unbearably, compared with that anything was tolerable. 

Although he knew very well what motive most people had assumed for the way O'Neill had become with Jackson after his appendix scare, he'd liked to think it was a fear of losing him that had made him become so bad-tempered and dismissive of him. He wasn't blind to the possibility that there might be some desire there also, O'Neill's behavior whenever Jackson became embroiled with yet another alien female had always appeared worryingly close to jealousy. But he had hoped that by signing Jackson off onto missions with other teams he would have given O'Neill the wake-up call he needed that he was much happier to have him close at hand, without anyone needing to get too Freudian. The other O'Neill, of course, had completely ruined hopes of that. If O'Neill and Doctor Jackson's relationship had already been combustible, the other O'Neill had added gasoline and a match. After that, it had been a little difficult to regard O'Neill's jealousy as something inert or repressed. He hoped those trips to Mackenzie had done some good but with O'Neill it was often hard to tell. He had certainly never yet been able to get through any mention of those events or of his other universe counterpart by referring to the man by his real name. Hammond had been forced to go through one entire mission report changing the name 'Jerk Off O'Neill' to 'Jack O'Neill' thinking grimly at the time that the title was sometimes all-too appropriate…

He closed his eyes as he told himself for the hundredth time that they were really gone this time. Maddening O'Neill, the irascible and occasionally insubordinate hero he would have been proud to call a son, and Doctor Jackson, a man who seemed to have a limpet-like ability to attach himself unknowingly to the affections of others. He wondered now that he had ever been tough enough to raise his voice to someone so inherently special. He didn't think he was getting soft in his old age, it was just impossible to deliberately put hurt into those expressive blue eyes, just as it was impossible to tell off someone like Major Carter, who worked so hard at being good, still trying to please a father who unbeknown to her had been so proud of her his whole life that he had never been able to get through a diplomatic gathering when she was growing up without telling everyone her school marks. Both the Carters could shout at one another with impunity by this point in their relationship, but he'd noticed even Jacob couldn't bring himself to raise his voice to Doctor Jackson. He wasn't averse to punishing O'Neill obliquely either if he thought he was failing to treat the younger man with proper respect. If O'Neill and Doctor Jackson had been in a relationship there was no doubt about who would have been sided with by every authority figure who knew them both, and it wouldn't have been the military man in the equation. If they'd been in a relationship…

It had been like losing two of his children. And, as with lost children, if he could get them back he was ready to forgive anything, turn a blind eye to anything. He just wanted to know they were alive, and knowing they were alive, find a way to get them home.

He hadn't been able to confide in anyone else that he still had hope. Major Carter was too ready to start number crunching at a moment's notice. Unable to believe that the answer didn't lie in her equations somewhere. Pure science had always been her friend before, but now it had abandoned her, the numbers multiplying and dividing into infinity without suggesting a single sum that could lead to the location of her friends. But he didn't think logic was going to help them this time. They needed Daniel to throw something in from left field, but none of them thought the same way he did, and he wasn't around to save himself. Sighing, Hammond turned back to the reports. He knew he must be getting desperate when he was combing through files of events that had taken place in different dimensions, but that was what he was doing all the same. Perhaps there was no help in finding their missing people in this dimension, but there might be a clue in another universe through one of these quantum mirrors Daniel Jackson had visited to meet with that other O'Neill…

***

Daniel ran his fingers curiously across the carvings on the stone wall, they'd faded with age and time but were still clear enough. It was odd to be shown around an ancient temple by Jack. To see the creepers hacked through that Jack had cleared so he could look at these wall carvings. Most of the structure was still swallowed by the jungle but these chambers were accessible now and he was squandering their flashlight batteries to examine what was depicted here.

"Do you agree?" Jack's hot breath against his ear distracted him, making his mind move lustwards. Unfortunately the prospect of imminent death was there right in front of him to take his mind back to the grim present.

Daniel sighed. "Yes." The whole wall had been carved and then painted once, but much of the paint had worn away, leaving only a few splashes of pigment here and there. The red flow from the volcano, a green smudge of color still remaining on the snake, a flicker of yellow tongue. There was still a hint of blue in the place where the event horizon should shimmer. A few of the departing people had a few specks of flesh tone left on their faces. One teardrop on an anguished face survived as a brown-skinned man carrying his child looked back at the volcano. They too had not wanted to be driven out of Paradise, and they had also been given time to record their imminent departure before they set out for the unknown. They'd left the 'gate address they'd taken, for people like him and Jack he presumed, an intergalactic forwarding address. Letting the ones who came later know that the volcano erupted and why and where they'd gone to escape the wrath of their angry god. He wondered what it was in the human race that made them blame themselves for things that were not their fault, conjuring up gods to deal out immortal punishment for what were entirely natural disasters, and yet also claimed the approval of the gods to support all manner of genocide and brutality. A species permanently tilting on the scales of mercy and cruelty, self-hatred and self-aggrandizement, curiosity and ignorance.

He could hear the birds calling in the trees, the monkeys shrieking to one another. They sounded agitated now, whereas they had sounded peaceful before. Did they know or was he just projecting his own fear onto them? On their way here there had been clear evidence of volcanic activity, not just the smoke now visible from the distant mountain, but the bubbling of water in the forest pools, the dead fish floating on the surface.

"Do you know where they came from?" Jack was looking not at the wall paintings but at his face. Daniel was aware of his gaze, Jack trying to memorize the way he looked, apparently convinced that everything ended with dead or that they would be separated in whatever afterlife he believed in. He remembered Jack talking about hell before they had gone to Netu as if it was somewhere he expected to end up, not flippant, although it had seemed a throwaway remark, as if some part of him believed it. Perhaps he was still enough of a Catholic at heart to believe Daniel would ascend to heaven while he would be condemned to hell. Perhaps people ended up where they thought they deserved to be. If so then Daniel was going to find a way to the underworld and bring him out of there. He wasn't going to memorize every line on Jack's face, the way his bristles looked against his skin, the scar through his left eyebrow, the shape of his nose, his mouth, his eyes… They were burned into his mind already and would never fade, and anyway, he was determined that alive or dead they were going to be together somehow.

He kept his voice as calm as possible. "I think it's a variant of the Polynesian Mahui-ike legends. She wasn't really a goddess, more of an ancestor-heroine. She lived in the underworld and could make fire. Maybe the Goa'uld brought people from different parts of Oceanic culture because there seems to be a mixture of Polynesian and Maori mythology at work here. There's something about a marriage between Tane and Mahui-ike producing a child that is part forest and part fire called Tanui-ike." His fingers traced the carvings carefully, feeling the words. "He was so large that people thought he was an island and came to live upon him, but he was alive and his soul was in the fruits of the snake-tree. His father, the forest god, told the people that they could cut down the trees to make fuel or to make boats but they must never take more than could be reborn again or his son would be weakened and begin to die. His mother said that the veins of her son ran with fire and that if he became angry he would bleed flame upon the land. To prevent incurring his anger they must treat all of the natural world with respect and they must never eat of the fruit of the snake-tree or his rage would destroy them all…" He sighed. "The rest is missing, but I guess someone ate the fruit of the snake-tree."

"I ate the fruit of the snake-tree," Jack admitted. "When I was trying to find a cure for you."

"Jack, the volcano isn't erupting because you ate some fruit. If Sam was here she could tell you there is no possible correlation between those two events and that a geophysical event like a volcanic eruption could never be triggered by the removal of a couple of apples from a tree."

Jack kept on looking at him. "If you were here you could tell me that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, unfortunately you're not really here because I'm holding your hormones captive and whenever you look at me you glaze over into slack-jawed lust…"

Daniel rolled his eyes. "Look, anthropologists may be inclined to believe six impossible things before breakfast but even we don't believe in volcanoes that erupt out of anger because of snake-trees losing a few fruit. And my lust is perfectly under control, thank you, and not affecting my judgment in any way."

"Is that so?" Jack leaned in really close so Daniel could feel his breath against his mouth. "Not affecting it in any way?"

Daniel swallowed hard. "Not at all."

When Jack kissed him he couldn't stop his eyes closing, his bones melting, that whimper escaping from his lips. His hands were reaching for Jack's belt buckle before he could stop himself, hormones jangling helplessly at being in close proximity to Jack's tanned muscular body. Jack was no better, his tongue curling around Daniel's, his stubble rough against Daniel's chin. His fingers were inside Daniel's shorts at once and Daniel felt himself hardening traitorously on immediate contact with those familiar callused hands. Jack had one hand behind his head, pulling Daniel deeper into the kiss, the other encouraging his cock. Daniel kissed him back, fierce and hungry, still seeing those fleeing people in his mind's eye, the volcano preparing to erupt, the mud of the drying pools bubbling from the subterranean fires…

Jack was pumping his cock now, his free hand encouraging him to kiss him deeper, which Daniel did, sucking on Jack's tongue, closing his eyes to concentrate on the sensations of Jack's mouth against his, their tongues intertwining, his fingers in the softness of Jack's grizzled hair, the rasp of Jack's unshaven jaw lightly abrading his skin, and the building pleasure of Jack giving him a hand job with sure deft strokes of his fingers and palm against the sensitive slippery skin of Daniel's cock. Jack's hand tightened in his hair, pulling him in deeper, deeper, while fingers stroked, then began to pull in quick hard strokes along his erection. He sucked harder on Jack's tongue as the pleasure built, feeling his face contort, spine stiffen, the orgasm building from the base of his spine, up through his balls to – 

"Yes…!"

He gasped it in triumph as his back arched and he shot his load into Jack's hand. At once Jack pulled him back in for another fierce kiss, the urgency of those in mortal peril in every flex of his eager tongue, every tender pressure of his warm lips.

Still panting from his recent climax, Daniel pulled away from Jack's kiss to nuzzle at his neck, feeling stubble brush against his mouth, nipping his shoulder then kissing a trail down his chest, through the curls of graying hair there, closing his teeth on one nipple which hardened at once under his touch while his fingers tugged at Jack's belt buckle and then buttons before his fingers were cupping his testicles, feeling the weight of them in his palm. He mouthed the other nipple to equal hardness before dropping a series of love bites down Jack's chest and ribs. Jack was still stroking his limp cock, milking the last drip of pleasure from it, but as Daniel slid down lower, Jack had to let him go. Daniel heard his breath catch in his chest, his cock bobbing higher in anticipation. 

Daniel murmured, "You could put someone's eye out with that thing."

Then Daniel was on his knees, mouth chasing a cock that was slippery with eagerness. Captured in the heat of his mouth it swelled, oozing salty precum which he licked from the tip. He ran his tongue along the base and felt Jack tense against the wall, needing to have the world blotted out for him, everything receding except the sensation of Daniel's hot eager mouth around his straining cock. Daniel sucked him hard, trying to make his throat relax to take him all the way in. The head felt heavy in his mouth, large and salty, the shaft wide and slippery, but he hungered for it, mouth and tongue feasting on it, sucking and licking, trying to drive Jack insane with pleasure, tongue darting eagerly from head to slit to gland, flickering over the underside, lapping at the slippery sides. Jack was moaning and despite his recent climax Daniel was feeling aroused all over again, turned on by the way he had Jack so helpless, hands braced and open against the stone walls as the man held himself up, pants down around his ankles, emitting gasps of pleasure at every suck. He hungered for Jack's cock, reveling in its length and thickness, but as he took it in deeper than he ever had before he thought about Jack fucking him, this same slippery eager erection entering his body, being thrust up into him, spurting semen deep inside him. He could feel his bare ass aching with need, open, eager, just at the thought of it, every cell in his body clearly focused on the next touch from Jack O'Neill. He jerked his head back just in time, letting the hot head slip from his mouth, and Jack cried out in frustration.

"God…Daniel… Please…!"

Daniel pulled himself up until they were on eye level, letting Jack see the passion and need in his eyes, reading the frustrated desire in brown eyes that were now almost black with wanting. Voice ragged with lust he said, "Fuck me, now, hard. Do it."

Then he was bending over a low wall, gripping the creepers that sprawled over the stonework in an arc no more graceful than his own, blinking at the tongue flicker of a bright green lizard that eyeballed him in suspicion as he straddled his legs.

For once, Jack didn't argue with him. Too brain fried with lust to think about anything except getting off somehow. He felt warm hands on his ass, parting his cheeks, a finger wet with spit or precum smeared around the entrance. He braced himself, wrapping his hands in the fibrous creepers, and then the cock was driven into him in a deep sure stroke. He cried out because it hurt so fucking much and felt so fucking good, exactly what his ass had been aching for, fearing it was going to miss out. "Harder…" 

Apocalyptic fucking. Nothing like it. So deep and wild and hot and desperate. He wanted Jack to thrust into him over and over, deeper and harder than anyone had ever been, screw his cock being tangled in creepers, screw the electric blue-winged butterfly that had just alighted on his wrist, screw the strangled whimpering sounds he was making as he was jolted against stonework and jungle greenery, the harsh rasping sounds Jack was making as he thrust as if it were the only thing keeping him alive. In other worlds he knew they were curled up together under a duvet somewhere, all consideration and cuddling, sweet kisses and tender sex. Well, good luck to those other Jacks and Daniels out there over the rainbow. They should try looking into the maw of their own mortality and see how considerate they felt like being then. He didn't want tender solicitude from Jack right now. The guy loved him. He knew that. The man had saved his life. But what he needed right now was the proof they were both alive, here in this moment, wanted to feel that familiar warm body slamming into his all the way to the root, hitting his prostate with every animal thrust, every cell in his body screaming its way towards orgasm, triumphant, mind-blowing, death-defying ecstasy.

"Yes…!"

They came together. Hard and fast and loud. They both got off too quickly these days. Speed-fuck junkies, as easy to arouse as teenagers, and, like teenagers, able to go from thought to climax in sometimes little more than sixty seconds. So much for tantric sex and it's non-ejaculatory climaxes after two hours of foreplay, half the island was now semen-spattered from mutual moments of 'let's drop 'em and do it now, baby' interaction of the decidedly non-spiritual kind. 

Daniel panted his way back to some kind of mental coherence and felt Jack's weight on his back, chest hair warm against his sweaty skin, a mouth nuzzling at his ear. He turned his head so they could kiss again, Jack's lips so gentle against his, a kiss as sweet as first love. He felt his guts clench at the look in Jack's eyes, the feel of that mouth against his, feeling like weeping then when a moment before he'd been happily lust-dazed in denial. He was losing more than his own life when this island was buried under molten rock and choking ash, he was losing this love as well. "Jack…"

"Ssshhh…" Jack whispered it tenderly then kissed him again, tongue slipping inside his mouth. He was such an incredible kisser, could turn Daniel's bones to water with the way his tongue wrapped itself around his, exploring his mouth like it was a lost continent he was claiming for himself alone. Jack pulled back carefully and his sated cock slid out, leaving Daniel's ass wet and exposed where a moment before it had been warm and secure. He closed his eyes as a finger slid into the vacated tightness. Ironically, after all these days of fuck-fuck-fucking with Jack he would have been a much more sexually skilful husband to Sha're now. Jack had more sexual experience than he did, had long since learned that after the honeymoon period of the first couple of years of a relationship you had to be inventive and considerate if you wanted to stop your partner straying. Especially when you were so often absent and were such an uncommunicative bastard when you were home. You had to make yourself irreplaceable. Someone worth waiting for. No one had ever told Daniel that women could climax over and over if you knew the right buttons to push, he'd thought it was a one-shot deal, at least for a couple of hours. It was Jack who'd told him that they loved you so much more if after you'd shot your mutual bolt together you then gave them something else to remember you by, and then something else again. That your cock could still be flaccid and panting from the last bout, out for the count, but if you had fingers and tongue there was no reason why your wife couldn't still be shrieking your name to the ceiling for the next twenty minutes. 

There was probably something slightly perverted about getting off by talking about cunnilingus on a blood-red beach as the sun sank beneath the waves and turned them both to silhouettes, but they had. Jack had told him women preferred it if you didn't shave before you put your head between their legs, the rasp of chin stubble against sensitive clitoral skin particularly arousing to them. Daniel had wished aloud that someone had told him that about twenty years earlier. Jack had pointed out that given how long it took Daniel to grow more than a pathetically faint fuzz on that baby's bottom skin of his that he'd have to be in preparation for days, meaning Daniel was never going to make it as the cunnilingus champion Jack had undoubtedly been. Daniel had disputed Jack's right to that particular crown. Jack had offered to demonstrate, and from talking about Jack putting his tongue between a woman's legs the conversation had slipped seamlessly into Jack talking about putting his tongue somewhere else. Daniel had confessed he couldn't see the attraction of either doing that or having it done to him. Jack had offered to demonstrate. Daniel had come screaming like a banshee. Then come screaming again as Jack entered the hole he'd prepared with such glottic dexterity and fucked him with slow deep strokes. The seagulls had shrieked their disapproval to the setting sun, scudding clouds passing over them like eavesdroppers. 

It had been the last barrier broken, admitting to one another they still loved their wives, still missed the women they had each watched give birth to a son, still found women desirable. It had added a whole new angle to their love-making, the 'women like it if you do this' demonstration. It wasn't a skill either of them expected to have a use for in the future but it provided another reason for them to make love as the waves broke over them like an unsuccessful chaperone. 

It also gave them a way back to their own heterosexuality, should they ever want to take it. Daniel knew he never would. Not that if he somehow lost Jack but survived himself he would never look at a woman again, he probably would, it was more likely than him looking at a man. It took a greater leap of trust to get naked with another man than it did to do so with another woman – as long as her eyes didn't glow in the dark – and he couldn't imagine ever trusting another guy as much as he trusted Jack. But as long as Jack was alive and with him, he wasn't going to look elsewhere for love. He wasn't so sure about Jack. The man had shown signs of jealousy in the past, had certainly disliked sharing Daniel with anyone else, but that didn't mean he was prepared to give up all possibilities of a return to a role as a husband and father. Here, in this place, with no one else to love but one another and all their shared history already making them closer then brothers even before one added the extra incentive of imminent death to keep them in a perpetual state of arousal, they were all the other one needed. If they ever got home, things might be different. The same Jack O'Neill who had woken him with kisses and whispered endearments for so many consecutive nights might be taking rapid steps away from him if he was ever back in the fold of the US Air Force. Fortunately for their current idyll and unfortunately for their future life expectancy, getting home didn't seem to be a problem they were ever going to have to worry about.

"Hey…" Another kiss, deep and breath-stealing before his ear was licked then teased with gentle nips. "Are you thinking again…?"

Daniel felt a skilful finger stroking his prostate. He'd tried telling Jack he wasn't Sara and couldn't be persuaded to come over and over by being fingered, sucked or tongued after sex, but as Jack had demonstrated several times now that he could indeed be persuaded to come – and not quietly either – he decided to save his breath. He would probably need it for moaning any minute. "I would never do that…" A sharp intake of breath as two fingers were slipped inside him. "Isn't foreplay something you usually do _before_ sex…?"

"This is before sex."

"You're forty-four, Jack."

Another kiss, another nibble of his ear, a probing of two powerful fingers that found exactly the right spot. "I'm going to die. Trust me, age is immaterial."

As Daniel made to twist around and look into his eyes, a hand was applied firmly but not roughly to the back of his head. "Don't get up. Leave that to me."

"I need to pee."

"Good. That'll make it better."

The lizard watched in disapproval as Jack rubbed his soft cock between Daniel's semen-slippery thighs to get himself hard again then kissed a trail down the back of his spine. When his tongue was plunged into Daniel's eager wet opening, Daniel squirmed with pleasure and began to make that whimpering noise which he always denied afterwards, the one that Jack told him made him sound like a girl in the back of her boyfriend's car. Jack brought him to the point of climax with his tongue probing inside him and fingers stroking his perineum, making him squirm and writhe in gasping pleasure, then held his cock to stop the blood escaping as he entered him with another hungry flex of his hips. He came in at a slight angle, thrusting in a rotating grinding motion using the fullness of Daniel's bladder to put pressure on his prostate from two sides at once, evidently carrying an anatomy diagram in his head of where everything was between Daniel's hip bones. They came together again, fast and loud, and Daniel's mouth opened hungrily as Jack shot his load inside him, his tongue feeling as eager as his ass had earlier when it had thought it was about to miss out.

They stumbled back to camp together, tripping over tree roots, kissing whenever they paused for breath, shirts sticking to their sweat-stained skin. Jack nibbled his ear, ruthless about exploiting the hotspot quality of that particular part of Daniel's anatomy, then kissed his cheekbone while Daniel pissed against a tree, the older man murmuring sweet nothings in the ear he was licking even as Daniel spilled a shower of ammonia onto an unsuspecting flower. He thought how absurd it was to be this head over heels in love, lust, and passion with a man he had known for so long. They had been so close for so many years and managed to get through the days easily without ripping off their clothes and doing the wild thing, and now they could barely get through an hour without kissing or fucking, touching or sucking. It was as if some switch had been tripped and now it couldn't be switched off again. They seemed doomed to be deliriously in desire with one another for the rest of their natural lives. Daniel guessed that if the volcano didn't erupt soon they would both be dead of exhaustion.

On their return to the cabin, they bathed in the sea, grateful to be naked despite the heat of the sun overhead, rinsing their clothes in the cold salt water, splashing one another like children, before Daniel sank to his knees in front of Jack's wet, clean, flaccid cock and began to lick it tenderly. He loved it like this, it seemed so delicate, nestling there shyly, like the new boy at school who didn't know anyone yet. Daniel couldn't look at it without wanting to make friends.

"I can't," Jack told him, breathlessly. "This time I really can't."

"S'okay…" Daniel mumbled indistinctly, "I'm happy with it like this. Just like the taste…" Except it was too saltwater clean at the moment, and he missed the musky Jack flavor he was hungry for. When Jack toppled backwards to land with a soft thump on his ass, Daniel just crawled forward and took up residence between his open thighs, determined to get the hang of this deep-throating thing if he had to practice for a week. Jack lay down flat on the beach, making a whimpering noise that Daniel didn't think sounded any too darned masculine either if they were going to start casting aspersions. He brought the concentration he usually only focused on archaeology to solving the problem of how to deep throat. This was a scientific experiment and while it was this soft and slippery, it should be easier to relax his throat and take it in deeper without choking… He sucked on it thoughtfully, running his tongue all around it, thinking that the thickness and length which were so pleasurable in other places were something of a disadvantage here. He'd never been good at breathing through his nose and his gag reflex kicked in much too easily. Definitely things that could be solved with practice though…

"Oh, Danny…"

"Hush, Jack," he told him through a mouthful of rapidly swelling flesh. "I'm busy."

Jack was too exhausted to be much of a participant but his cock was still clearly very aware that it was going to have to cram all the sex it wanted for the rest of its life into these last few days because it swelled very quickly to painful erectness, making Jack moan for release. Daniel decided that this was the most comfortable position he'd found so far for oral sex. With his weight on his arms he sucked on the head of Jack's cock as if it was an ice cream, letting his tongue play all around it before attempting to take it in deeper. He guessed the trick was to breathe around the solid shaft of flesh filling his mouth while relaxing the muscles at the back of his throat, unfortunately the muscles at the back of his throat didn't seem to know how to relax and were clenched in opposition to anything being pushed down between them. Daniel sucked harder, letting the cock push in as deep as he could get it before his gag reflex kicked in, he let it slip in and out rapidly, trying not to let his teeth graze on the sides, pausing to suck hard on the head, run his tongue across the slit, then back to letting it slip in and out as deeply as it could. He was sure that if he just got a bit more practice he could – 

"Oh…Daniel…!"

A stream of hot salty fluid hit the back of his throat and he swallowed in surprise. He licked the head clean automatically then looked up at Jack in mild exasperation. "Damnit, Jack, don't you have any self-control?"

"I'm sorry." Jack lifted his head and rolled his eyes at him. "But you did have my dick in your mouth."

"I'm never going to learn how to deep throat if you keep coming that fast."

Jack put an arm across his eyes, letting his head flop back on the damp side. "If you learn to deep-throat I'll be dead before the volcano even thinks about erupting."

As Daniel opened his mouth to respond, he saw what looked like a storm cloud over the island. Then he realized the rest of the sky was bluer than lapis lazuli. He licked the last of Jack's come from his lips automatically but the day felt cold despite the heat of the sun. "It's thinking about erupting already."

Jack looked at his face then twisted round to follow his gaze. They stared at the smoke together, the wisps of it being coughed up into the sky. When the familiar roll of distant thunder reached them it sounded as if the island was clearing its throat in preparation for a roar. He saw Jack close his eyes in a brief moment of defeat and then open them again with nothing but determination in his gaze. "Let's start building that raft."

It was instinctive to look out at the swelling sea. He could see the height of the waves out beyond the breakers, could imagine the silent approach of the sharks, their dorsal fins cutting a line through the water like the turret of a submarine, but when he turned back to the jungle not a parrot was squawking, not a monkey calling, there was just the silent drift of that dark smoke high above the trees. "Yes," he said quietly. "Let's start on that right now."

***

Hammond wasn't quite sure when they'd acquired Narim as an unpaid research assistant to Major Carter's experiments, but somewhere along the line the Tollan seemed to have taken up semi-regular residence in the SGC. In theory this was a temporary measure while he helped her grapple with the chemical compound of new elements not known to earth scientists and whose properties Major Carter wanted to examine. Narim had justified his inclusion in the experiment to the Tollan by saying that he was there to prevent a tragedy from occurring if she mixed two unstable chemical elements together. His justification to Hammond had been that Major Carter was in need of support from all the friends she had right now. That had been enough to have Hammond wave Narim to the VIP suite and offer him their hospitality for as long as he could get leave to stay.

Teal'c had gone on several missions with other SG teams, all of them ones geographically close to the one from which O'Neill and Doctor Jackson had been escaping at the time the matter stream had split. No one had actually admitted they were using up government resources looking for people who all scientific minds agreed could be anywhere in the galaxy, but there had been a sudden interest in missions to the worlds in the gate system clustering around the place where they had been lost and Hammond had found himself rubber stamping them without a murmur of disagreement. 

He was very aware of the place where Daniel's input should have been. Major Carter had put her faith in scientific equations and it had failed to produce a formula which helped her. Teal'c was putting his faith in commonsense and loyalty, a dogged determination not to give up searching whatever might happen. But they needed something else, something lateral, illogical, something only Daniel Jackson could have thought of…

For the twentieth time he turned back to the reports on his desk and then paused. Something only Daniel Jackson could have thought of might not appear very useful when it was Daniel Jackson who was missing, except they did know where there was another Daniel Jackson, and one who was an ally of sorts.

He was out of his office before he had thought that it would make more sense to pick up the phone, hurrying along the corridors to Major Carter's office and entering without even pausing to knock. She had dark shadows under her eyes and looked up in annoyance at the interruption before she realized it was him. "General…" Evidently mistaking his excitement for stress, her eyes widened in horror. "Not Teal'c? Don't tell me Teal'c is…?"

"SG-3 returned ten minutes ago and Teal'c is fine, Major," he reassured her hastily, barely preventing himself from patting her gently on the shoulder as he did so. The naked fear in her eyes at the thought of losing another loved one had pierced him to the heart. "I've had an idea and I wanted to consult you about it."

"Samantha, I have brought you some more coffee as requested, but as I said earlier I really think stimulants are the last thing you need when you are already unable to sleep –" Seeing Hammond there, Narim broke off in confusion and then made a bow that was surprisingly graceful given the mug of steaming canteen coffee he held in each hand. "General Hammond."

"Just the man I want to see." Hammond closed the door, took one mug from him and handed it to Major Carter. "You two both met the other O'Neill, yes? The one from the different dimension. The one…"

No one said aloud: _The one Doctor Jackson had an affair with_. That was one of those things that was written down nowhere and mentioned aloud by nobody. 

Hammond continued evenly, "The one who befriended Doctor Jackson."

"Yes, sir." Major Carter was holding the mug in her hands gingerly as if her skin had become so sensitive to everything that even warm china could scald her.

"I believe there was also a Doctor Jackson in that dimension who had been made a part of the Stargate Program?"

"You mean the one who…" _The one that O'Neill dumped our Daniel for._ Major Carter cleared her throat. "The one who was recruited to the SGC by that O'Neill after meeting our Daniel."

"I was wondering if you could see any good reason for us not to seek his assistance?" Hammond looked between them expectantly.

Major Carter's mouth was open, her gaze blank. He wondered if she was thinking about how painful it would be to step through the 'gate to another SGC and see her friends alive and well and strangers. It was Narim who said crisply, "No reason at all, General Hammond. Let me return to Tollana immediately and contact the other O'Neill through the quantum mirror."

Hammond was still looking at Major Carter's blank, hurt face but he wrenched his gaze away to nod to Narim. "Thank you, Narim. I would appreciate that very much."

As soon as the door was closed, he said gently, "There's always hope."

She gave him an exhausted smile. "It's the hope that makes it so unbearable. If I knew they were dead I could mourn them, but…" She put a hand up to her face. "I keep thinking of them being out there somewhere, wounded and in need of our help. Teal'c feels the same way."

"I know he does, Major."

She ran a hand through her hair. "When we were in Netu, they never doubted for a minute that Teal'c would get there in time. When the Colonel and I were in Antarctica, he kept telling me I'd work it out, but the fact is, I didn't. Daniel did."

"Doctor Jackson didn't have hypothermia or a wounded man to take care of," Hammond reminded her gently. "When you and Teal'c set such impossible standards for yourselves, is it any wonder you don't always live up to them?"

She looked at him and he saw again how dark were the shadows under her eyes. "Do you really think this could work?"

He sighed and this time did pat her gently on the shoulder. "I think anything is worth trying that might bring two of our people back home again. Don't you, Major?"

The look on her face told him that she wasn't sure she could take the hope, that if she allowed herself to think there was a chance and then that chance turned to nothing, she wasn't sure she could survive it. But her smile was brave and resolute. "Yes, sir. Anything at all."

***

They were in bed when the call came. Despite being daytime, at the prospect of a day off while the technicians played with the light switches during a 'routine maintenance day', they had both decided the only place they wanted to be was the bedroom. Daniel had taken a little coaxing to get him away from an interesting translation he'd brought home with him. O'Neill had been forced to nibble his ear for several seconds before Daniel noticed he was there. There had been a few half-hearted murmurs along the lines of: "Not now, Jack, I'm busy", but O'Neill had been persistent and Daniel, after so many years denied the comforts of touch, was wonderfully susceptible to kisses, caresses, licks, and the all-important sweet nothings. Especially as O'Neill's sweet nothings were sweet somethings these days, and when he whispered in Daniel's ear what he meant to him and how much he wanted him and what it would do to him if he ever lost him, he was telling no more than the truth.

So, at the time the telephone's shrill clamor interrupted them, Daniel was lying naked and supine in O'Neill's king sized bed, artifacts and translations almost entirely forgotten, with O'Neill naked on top of him, kissing him with tender concentration, while Daniel's fingers strayed curiously over O'Neill's scarred, muscled body and their semi-erect cocks jostled together pleasurably in a slow, rhythmic dance. 

O'Neill groaned. "How many tech-johnnies does it take to change a lightbulb anyway?" He snatched up the phone: "O'Neill."

Daniel watched as his eyes widened, the muscle in his jaw tensed, and he changed from relaxed civilian to focused military officer. "Yes, General. We'll be right there."

Daniel groaned silently and banged his head on the pillow. As O'Neill replaced the receiver, and got out of bed, he said, "I hate the military."

O'Neill bent and kissed him, coaxing his mouth open, wrapping his tongue around Daniel's while Daniel showed every sign of sulking. "You love us really," he murmured.

"I love _you_ ," Daniel retorted. "The organization you work for sucks."

"You work for it too."

"Only because of the perks."

O'Neill blinked. "Dental? Medical?"

Daniel slipped a hand between O'Neill's legs. "I was thinking more along the lines of…colonel."

O'Neill swallowed. "So I'm a perk now?"

"You're a whole benefits package wrapped up in one." Daniel craned his neck and began to nuzzle at O'Neill's erection. "You can't go out like this."

O'Neill breathed quickly as Daniel's tongue danced delicately across the head of his cock. "Daniel…we have to be at the SGC as soon as possible. Hammond didn't say why but it sounded urgent."

"We need to shower first." Daniel gave him a look that was all wide-eyed innocence. The eyelash batting that accompanied it, however, was nothing other than seductive.

Everything except O'Neill's resolve immediately hardened. "Okay. But we have to be quick."

Daniel gave him a slow smile, someone who was enjoying the first power he'd been given in his whole emotionally neglected life. "I promise we'll be very quick."

 

They could make as much noise as they liked in the shower, the powerful jets of hot water drowning out even the most passionate cries. When O'Neill had persisted in interrupting Daniel in the midst of a particularly difficult translation of Nabataean script that had left the younger man caffeine-hyped and sleep-deprived, Daniel had observed darkly that someone could be cut up with a chainsaw in that shower without any of the neighbors being any the wiser and he'd be happy to demonstrate if he didn't get some peace and quiet. Now, however, O'Neill was grateful for the roar of the water as it meant he could grunt and groan as much as he liked. 

For all his extraordinary stubbornness and blithe indifference to his own personal safety, not to mention his terrifying curiosity, Daniel did have a passive side as well. It just didn't feel very passive when he was the one luring O'Neill into yet another indiscretion with a very active array of lip-licking, eyelash batting, and seductive little glances, then it felt entirely as if O'Neill was being led around by his dick and his heart by someone very much in control of the situation. However, once they were actively engaged in what that contract they had signed described obliquely as 'bonding rituals', that was when Daniel tended to give him one of those totally brain-melting, groin-hardening 'my hero' looks and let O'Neill do anything he wanted to him. O'Neill had to admit that while, when there was all the time in the world, what he wanted to do to him was to cover him in kisses from head to toe and then lick melted ice cream from his navel before pleasing him in new and interesting ways, when they were pressed for time, his alpha male over-active libido side had been known to swing into action, usually roaring and chest-beating like a mountain gorilla.

"Oh god… Jack…!"

O'Neill hoped that no one – and that meant _no one_ – except him ever found out that the quickest way to stop stubborn, argumentative, non-military Jackson from speaking, thinking, or occasionally even breathing, was to pin him up against a hard surface, preferably under a steady stream of warm water, and pound his prostate until he screamed. 

They had been having such a nice romantic time taking a slow trip around each other's erogenous zones too. He'd planned a much more leisurely shower to follow as well. He'd even bought ice cream. He always had a suspicion that Teal'c wouldn't approve of his alpha male side, and that if Daniel ever winced when sitting down in a briefing Hammond would probably be after him with a lethal weapon as well. Weakly explaining that Daniel really liked it unevolved some days just wasn't going to cut it, so he tried to keep their focus on the romantic nuzzling, licking, kissing and stroking side of love-making. Except when Daniel or the SGC derailed him and enticed his inner caveman out to play…

"Yes, God, yes…! Jack…! No…! Yes…! Harder…!"

There was a knack to getting those jolts of pleasure as cock head impacted with prostate gland to turn into one continuous wave of irradiating ecstasy and O'Neill had learned it years ago during his misspent youth, then polished up the technique during his misspent adulthood, and intended to keep refining it during his misspent advance into middle age. And just because it was so out of character for the younger man, he did take a guilty pleasure in seeing Daniel reach a point of incoherent moaning mindless submission, when O'Neill could do anything he wanted to him and all Daniel would do in response was weakly gasp his acquiescence. Now he scraped Daniel's wet hair back from his face as his hips jerked rhythmically, angling his cock to hit the bulls-eye every time, while kissing that open mouth and dazed open eyes. He could see Daniel was heading for orgasm, face beginning to screw up, eyes fixed on a distant point somewhere inside his own body, and he hadn't even touched his erection yet, just this was enough, O'Neill driving into him with these deep rapid thrusts.

Daniel came with his fingers splayed against the wet tiles, pouring himself into the jet of water, back arching, screaming something incoherent that was immediately swallowed by the sound of the shower and the kiss O'Neill planted on his mouth. He kept fucking him through his orgasm, the way Daniel liked it, milking the last drop of pleasure from him. When Daniel's legs gave out, he lowered him carefully to the tiled floor of the shower and curled around him, still jerking his hips steadily in that way that made Daniel whimper in blind reaction. He kissed him tenderly, working his tongue in between Daniel's parted lips, waiting for Daniel to come back from wherever it was he went to after a really spectacular climax. He watched Daniel's eyelashes fluttering, saw a tongue flicker maddeningly over wet lips, and then Daniel was focusing on him, giving him a sideways look over his shoulder of awed admiration that made him feel simultaneously ten feet tall and unworthy to so much as look at him, let alone get to spend the rest of his life with him.

"How do you do that…?" Daniel asked breathlessly, eyes closing with pleasure as another thrust brushed his prostate, looking for all the world like a cat being stroked.

O'Neill moved his hips again, gently now, not worried about his own climax, just loving seeing what it did to Daniel to feel O'Neill's cock inside him. He saw Daniel's mouth open spasmodically, closing his eyes as he moved back into the rhythm. "Practice," O'Neill admitted. 

Daniel was panting, eyes fluttering closed again as he continued to move himself back onto O'Neill's cock, stimulating his prostate with unashamed pleasure. "I knew there had to be an upside to marrying the SGC Casanova."

O'Neill kissed him in mute apology for his checkered past. "We have to go."

"I want to come again."

"Daniel, we're late." 

Daniel looked at him over his shoulder and then tightened around O'Neill's cock. "Fuck me again, Flyboy. You know you want to. And if you still don't come I'll suck you until you do."

 

Three minutes later only the keenest-eared neighbors would have heard someone screaming "Jack…!" at the top of his lungs. And approximately ninety seconds after that, it would have taken specialist listening equipment to catch that moaned 'Daniel…' that was gasped in such helpless adoration.

***

It was strange to step through the quantum mirror themselves after so long. To touch it and feel the blue light shimmer through them. Stranger still to be traveling with General Hammond and Narim in the places O'Neill and Daniel Jackson should have been occupying. 

Beside him, Teal'c felt Major Carter barely swallow a gasp as she saw the two of them standing at the bottom of the ramp in the 'gateroom, their missing teammates, alive and whole and well. Except it was not them, of course, but their doubles from a different dimension. Narim gave Major Carter a look of sympathy, resting his hand on her arm, and Teal'c wondered if this was the real reason why Hammond had suggested the Tollan accompanied them, so he could help their friend through what was clearly going to be a traumatic experience. He was also feeling a little disorientated by seeing the two men standing there. He had been dreaming about O'Neill and Daniel Jackson for weeks now, imagining them calling out to him, finding them only to lose them again in nightmare after nightmare. Waking to a renewed sense of failure, a renewed ache of grief.

They had met this O'Neill before, which helped a little, he not only looked like the O'Neill they had lost, but like himself, hair a little darker than the one they knew, less lines on his face. But the Daniel Jackson was a shock to both of them. Like the friend they had lost, but not as they had last seen him, the way he had been when they had first met him. His blue eyes looked at them with open curiosity, full of trust, and then a widening of surprise as he recognized them. His hair was long, trailing into his eyes, thick dark gold in color framing skin of astonishing purity, and a mouth now partially opened in confusion as he saw them coming down the ramp. Beside him the Captain Carter they had first seen in the quantum mirror was telling him about entropic cascade failure but Teal'c doubted that this other Daniel Jackson was taking in her words, he was too fascinated by them. As he drew nearer to the other Carter, he felt the presence of a naquada-based symbiote and exchanged a glance with Major Carter, who also winced.

"I am Tok'ra." Captain Carter's eyes flashed briefly. "I am Khenara. Captain Carter bravely offered to blend with me when there was no other hope for my survival." The golden glow faded and Captain Carter smiled ruefully. "I didn't have too many options myself at the time."

"Good to see you again." Colonel O'Neill stepped forward and touched Teal'c briefly on the shoulder, nodding respectfully to Hammond. "May I introduce…Doctor Daniel Jackson."

The pride in Colonel O'Neill's voice, which he had so clearly tried and failed to suppress, made Teal'c look at him sharply. Daniel Jackson had told him that this O'Neill had fallen in love with the Daniel Jackson in his dimension but Teal'c had presumed the young man was simply now the object of his desires, his next conquest. But the expression on the colonel's face as he looked at the young man beside him was bordering on doting.

"Pleased to meet you." Doctor Jackson smiled at them and shook Teal'c's hand. "This is incredible. I've read the reports about alternate realities but I never thought I'd actually get to meet anyone from a different…dimension." He turned to Major Carter, and although Teal'c suspected she, like he, had been feeling an unadmitted hostility towards this young man before, not just for having seduced the other O'Neill away from their Daniel Jackson, but for being alive and well when theirs was missing and possibly dead, he now saw her visibly falter. This version of Daniel Jackson was not just too here and too real, too three-dimensionally whole and untouched, he was too innocent and unbruised by life as well. There was nothing in his eyes but curiosity and kindness, the way their Daniel had used to look before fate had decided to abuse his trust so many times. Seeing Doctor Jackson was reminding Teal'c of how sweet their missing teammate still was, despite the second skin he'd been forced to grow of waspish asides and brittle irony, there was still a bewilderment about him when confronted with cruelty or injustice, a disbelief that the human race could be capable of such things, an inherent belief in the goodness in all species, a child of the universe expecting to make friends wherever he went, astonished when people wanted instead to be his enemy. This was like seeing their own Daniel without his defenses in place, the inner man who Daniel too often kept hidden from the world these days.

O'Neill saw their expressions and winced. "This must be pretty weird for you."

"Yes." Major Carter was still staring at Doctor Jackson as if he were a ghost. She looked up at O'Neill with an attempt at a smile. "It's just been so long since we've seen them…"

"Let's go to my office." The other Hammond had been exchanging formal greetings with their own but he now gave Major Carter a paternal glance of sympathy and waved them towards the exit. "I understand you're hoping to pick our Doctor Jackson's brains?"

General Hammond cleared his throat awkwardly, "Well, when our Captain Carter and Colonel O'Neill were trapped in Antarctica, it was Doctor Jackson who perceived how to get them back and – "

"Daniel was the one who worked out how to open the Stargate," Major Carter added, speaking rapidly, her eyes bright with tears or fever or a combination of both. Teal'c laid a gentle hand on her shoulder but she continued to speak with the same swift enthusiasm. "We thought it was some kind of equation or symbol. We were trying go through all these old books on ancient alphabets. Do you know how many ancient alphabets there are? And how, if you don't know what they mean they all start to look the same after a while. You stare at the symbols and the alphabets and you realize you've been doing it for hours and have no idea what you've even learned. So Katherine thought we needed a linguist, someone who understood all these alphabets and might recognize a really obscure one, and someone who could think his way around corners – that was what she said. So she went and got Daniel – and you know what was the really funny thing? – it wasn't an alphabet at all – and, of course you know that because you got yours to work too – but I always thought it was kind of ironic that we were all sitting there, all these astrophysicists thinking we were looking at an alphabet and it took a linguist to tell us we were really looking at the constellations." She smiled at them brightly but there were undoubtedly unshed tears in her eyes.

General Hammond spoke to his counterpart with an apologetic wince. "As I'm sure you know, General, SG teams form very close bonds with one another."

"I know." The other Hammond gave Major Carter a look that was full of sympathy. "And I know what it's like when you think you've lost one of your own."

Major Carter gave them a brief smile but then turned to her counterpart, clearly thinking she would be the most understanding, and launched into another description of all Daniel Jackson's moments of thinking laterally, of problem solving and clear-headedness even in times of great stress. Captain Carter nodded in sympathy and put an arm around Major Carter's shoulders, but the glance she shot at Teal'c was one full of distress. Teal'c only nodded to her quietly. He needed no one else to tell him his teammate was hanging on by her fingernails, that the strain of having two friends lost and being unable to find them was wearing her nerves to shreds. "I don't worry so much about the colonel because he's a soldier and he knows how to…but Daniel… And then I think that Daniel always falls on his feet because everyone loves him when they meet him, but the colonel isn't good with other people. He can seem rude sometimes and… Then I think that Daniel's just a civilian and he doesn't really know how…bad people can be sometimes, and what if a Goa'uld found them or slave traders or… what if they're hurt…?"

Doctor Jackson was trying to comfort her, talking about coming back to their dimension and taking as long as was needed to help her. Colonel O'Neill seemed grim yet with a faraway look in his eyes. Teal'c wondered how it felt to hear that your ex-lover was lost when your own lover was safe and well beside you, if the guilt at your own relief was crippling.

Captain Carter was talking about equations and Narim was interrupting quietly, telling her that they had already tried all those calculations without success. It was odd to be one of a team of four again, right and yet so wrong, although Hammond was very dear to him, and he had become fond of Narim over all these weeks when the Tollan had proven to be such a good friend to Major Carter, the only team he wanted to be a part of was one that was led by O'Neill and containing himself, Major Carter, and Daniel Jackson.

As soon as they were in the other General Hammond's office, O'Neill said quietly, "I know how to find the Daniel from your dimension."

They all looked at him in disbelief and he rubbed his jaw in embarrassment. "Not because I can do better math than the Tollan or Carter, or have a more lateral mind than Daniel, or –" and here he stole a look at the young Doctor Jackson, "because he and I have a psychic connection so strong that even the bonds of time and space can't break it. I can find him because I was afraid of losing him so I took steps accordingly."

The other Hammond said quietly, "Explain, Colonel?"

O'Neill looked between them with slight defiance, deliberately avoiding only Narim's eyes. "Look, when I first met him he was unconscious after having being pounded half to death by this guy he was still trying to reason with the next time he met him. He had no more sense of self-preservation than a bottle of soda pop. He used to go around throwing himself at armed serpent guards, for crying out loud!"

Hammond said quietly, "We know what our own Doctor Jackson is like, Colonel."

O'Neill ran a hand through his hair. It was still brown, Teal'c noted, barely streaked with gray. He wondered how long it would be before this man's hair was as silver as that of the O'Neill he knew. "He was crossing dimensions to see me. I was having nightmares worrying about what happened if Kawalsky or I screwed up and he got lost somewhere in transit. So I asked the Tollan for help. I knew they had the technology, they'd shown it to us the last time we were there. It was based on their health-monitoring system but it worked over much greater distances, and they were experimenting with inter-dimensional physics. We saved their damned world, I figured the least they could do was…" He shrugged.

It was Narim who got it. Looking at O'Neill levelly he said, "You stole the prototype of the omacore tracking device?"

O'Neill faced him defiantly. "I borrowed it, but only because you guys wouldn't lend it to me the way I asked." Seeing Narim's expression he threw up his hands. "You had all the blueprints! It wasn't like you couldn't make another one. I needed the prototype more than you did. So I…borrowed it."

"In our dimension, Colonel, the prototype would have to be physically injected under the epidermis of the skin of the person you were hoping to track. It could not afterwards be retrieved or re-used."

O'Neill scratched his jaw. "Well, yeah, it's pretty much the same here."

"In my dimension 'borrowing' suggests something on temporary loan that can later be returned in more or less the condition in which it was found…"

"Okay! Okay! I stole it! I stole it and I injected it into Doc so I could find him again if he got lost. I did it when he was asleep. He didn't even know. And then I fell in love with…" He looked at Doctor Jackson, who was gazing at him with a stricken look on his face. He winced. "And then I fell in love with Daniel and I broke up with Doc and…there didn't seem a reason to tell him he had some alien technology in his bloodstream. It wasn't going to get him into trouble with anyone. It was undetectable on a MRI, and it wasn't as if he was the one who'd stolen it."

Narim sighed and looked at the ground. "The O'Neill in our dimension also asked if he could use the prototype to keep track of his teammates. I turned him down."

"Well, you did the same here. But sometimes it's not a good idea to take 'no' for an answer, so I didn't." He looked at his Hammond and winced. "I'm sorry, sir. I was just so worried about Doc – and I felt so damned guilty. I figured the least I could do was keep him safe."

In response, Hammond glowered at O'Neill. "To make up for the way you were exploiting a diplomatic initiative to seduce one of my people, you mean?"

Teal'c and Major Carter both looked at Hammond in surprise and saw the man was furious. Teal'c got a glimmer of what a possible suitor for Hammond's daughters would have faced had his intentions been anything other than honorable.

O'Neill looked at him in shock. "What? I didn't… I mean…"

The gaze Hammond fixed on O'Neill was not one Teal'c would ever have wanted directed his way. "That would be why you used the Doctor Jackson from our dimension for your own sexual gratification for several weeks before dumping him when you tired of him, would it, Colonel?"

"It wasn't like that." O'Neill looked at the young man beside him. "I just fell in love with someone else. It wasn't as if he was in love with me. He was already in love with…" Evidently remembering in time that the regulations might be different on their world, he broke off awkwardly. "Let's just try and get him back, shall we? I'm presuming wherever he is, his O'Neill is with him so we should be able to find both of them."

"You have the controls for the tracking device?" Narim enquired.

O'Neill looked sheepish. "Yes, I borrowed…stole that too. The Narim in my dimension covered up for me. He has a thing for Carter here so he tends to cut us a lot of slack." He jerked his head at his 2IC.

"Words fail me, Colonel," the other Hammond said in disbelief. 

It was Teal'c who said quietly, "Surely the important matter is that we now may be able to find the whereabouts of Daniel Jackson and Colonel O'Neill?"

The fair-haired Doctor Jackson nodded his head, turning to Hammond. "Sir, Teal'c is right. We can apologize to the Tollan afterwards. The main point is that these people have lost their friends and we may be able to help them get them back."

"You cannot assist us to do anything, Doctor Jackson," Teal'c told him gently. "Entropic cascade failure means you cannot accompany us back to our dimension for longer than forty-eight hours without risking losing your own corporeal integrity."

"We want to help," O'Neill put in. "Look, your Daniel is a friend of mine. He's important to me. I…need to know he's okay." The glance he darted at the young man beside him pleaded not just for understanding but absolution.

Doctor Jackson man looked pale but he found a watery smile. "I understand." But the light had gone from his face and he looked as if he had lost some part of himself between the 'gateroom and this conversation.

"They can accompany you," Narim put in quietly. "We have also been experimenting with quantum mirror physics and we have found a way to create a field of stability around a traveler in a dimension in which a living counterpart already exists. It effectively maintains the traveler within his own dimension even as he travels in the other one, or at least makes his body believe that – "

"No one cares," O'Neill told him swiftly, anxiety making his temper ragged, Teal'c noticed, in much the same way as it did with the O'Neill they knew. Hearing that Daniel Jackson was missing and possibly dead had clearly affected him strongly.

"I think what Jack means, Narim," the young man looked at O'Neill briefly before turning back to the Tollan, "is that we would be very grateful if you would allow us to use this technology to accompany the other SG-1 in their search for Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson, but we aren't necessarily able to understand the complexities of the science involved."

Narim inclined his head. "A timely reminder, Doctor Jackson. Let us by all means stick to the essentials."

As Teal'c went to walk past the two Hammonds he heard the one from his dimension muttering darkly: "…sure he is a good man, General, the one in my dimension is, but tell me, if it was the O'Neill from _my_ dimension who'd got the Doctor Jackson from _your_ dimension into bed, how would you react…?"

Teal'c automatically followed the general's gaze to Doctor Jackson. He had a hand on Major Carter's arm and was talking to her gently, trying to get her to smile. She was wiping tears from her face but half-laughing at the same time. The uniform the young man was wearing looked at least two sizes too big for him and he had pulled the sleeves of his jacket down into his palms, tugging on them out of habit without even seeming to know that he was doing it. When he looked across at O'Neill, he wrapped his arms around himself, self-hugging in a way all too reminiscent of the Daniel Jackson they had lost when feeling unhappy.

The other Hammond said grimly, "I'd come after him with a P-90, General." 

"Then you know how I feel right now."

O'Neill said shortly, "Let's get this show on the road, shall we? I'll go and get the tracking monitor and meet you in the 'gateroom." He caught the eye of General Hammond. "If that's all right with you, sir?"

His C.O. sighed. "Yes, Colonel. You and Doctor Jackson may accompany General Hammond and his party in their search for the Doctor Jackson and O'Neill from their dimension. You may leave as soon as you have everything you need."

Teal'c watched the fair-haired Doctor Jackson watching O'Neill leave the room without a backward glance, leaving the door to the corridor open, boots loud on the gray-colored flooring as he broke into a run. He wrapped his arms more tightly around himself but found a smile for Major Carter, saying, "I'm sure they'll be fine. The Jack I know is very good in a crisis and I'm sure the one in your world is no different." His gaze strayed back to the doorway through which O'Neill had departed and the look in his eyes was full of longing. Despite being determined to keep a critical distance from these other dimensional counterparts, when looking at the wistful expression on the face of this Daniel Jackson, Teal'c found it a little more difficult than in the past to convince himself that theirs was the only reality of consequence.

As Teal'c made to ask Narim for an explanation of how the Tollan technology worked to offset the effects of entropic cascade failure, a man burst into the room with only the vaguest attempt at a knock. Teal'c recognized him at once – how could he not when he had once killed him? – but the dark-haired powerful-looking soldier cast only the most cursory glance in their direction before looking at the other Hammond. "Is it true, sir?" He glared at them then, a brief raking glance over his shoulder. "Did these people lose Doctor Jackson?"

The other Hammond spoke calmly, "There was an overload of power to the 'gate system, Major. It seems that the stream split and the Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson from the other dimension were sent to a different location. We are going to offer these people every assistance in retrieving their missing teammates."

"Permission to accompany them, sir?"

Teal'c remembered now that Major Kawalsky had always had that terrier-like energy, that decisive way of moving and talking, impatient and straightforward to the point of bluntness. Now he was not just focused, he was trembling with suppressed rage.

Hammond said quietly, "Permission refused, Major."

"Sir?" Kawalsky looked at him in disbelief. "With respect, general, as I'm the only one here who is dead in the dimension Doc comes from I wouldn't even need to wear that Tollan thing the others are going to have to put on. And I want to be there. I…need to be there."

As the man turned his head, Teal'c saw his face and saw how stricken he looked, his grief and anxiety transmuted into rage.

"No, Major."

"You're letting Daniel go and you're not letting me go?"

Hammond said quietly, "General Hammond specifically requested the assistance of Doctor Jackson in this matter, but there is a limit to how many of my key personnel I am willing to commit to this venture."

"What, so as they've lost their own Daniel you're going to lend them ours? I wouldn't let these people take my dog for a walk!" Kawalsky wheeled on them, unable to vent his frustration at Hammond as the man was his CO, but needing to strike out at someone. "What were you people thinking anyway? Christ, five minutes with Doc and I could see he wasn't safe to be let out without a keeper. You've known him how long and you didn't think to keep him close by? Why didn't you keep an eye on him? Do you make a habit of losing your civilians? The colonel and I managed to chaperone him through sixteen different dimensions without him picking up even a scratch. What the hell do you do with archaeologists in your dimension, play Russian Roulette with them?"

"Major Kawalsky!" The other Hammond barked out the man's name angrily. "That is a lot more than enough from you on this matter."

General Hammond interceded quickly, patting Kawalsky on the shoulder. "That's okay, son. I understand your frustration, really I do. Every time Doctor Jackson goes missing I feel it take another few years off my life too, and I promise you no harm will come to your Doctor Jackson while he is in our universe."

Kawalsky ran a hand through his hair, bowing his head in defeat, looking at Hammond in undisguised misery. "I'm sorry, General, but I got fond of him, you know? Me and the colonel, we spent a lot of time with him. He's a good kid but he's too damned trusting. Our Daniel's the same. That's why we don't let him run off and play by himself. It's just not safe."

Teal'c saw their Hammond smile, despite the lines of tension on his face. Doctor Jackson looked a little indignant, mouth opening to protest, but he refrained from comment as Hammond patted Kawalsky gently again, explained that he was already taking enough of their dimension's resources by borrowing Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson but he was extending an invitation right now for Kawalsky to come and see for himself that Doctor Jackson was well once they got him back. His tone admitted no possibility that Doctor Jackson might not be coming back but Teal'c saw the flicker of anguish in his eyes he had worked so hard to disguise. He saw Hammond's counterpart notice it as well, and was not surprised when they were ushered out of the room so the two Hammonds could talk in private.

Out in the corridor, Teal'c regarded Kawalsky levelly as the major gazed at him, trying not to think of him the way he'd last seen him, with his eyes glowing gold then glazing into the vacant stare of a dead man. 

"Just get him back," Kawalsky said quietly. 

"We will certainly do our best to retrieve Daniel Jackson and Colonel O'Neill from wherever they may have been sent, Major Kawalsky," Teal'c said gently.

The man nodded, took a deep breath as he steeled himself to wish them well when he was clearly still bursting to accompany them and unable to believe they would succeed without his assistance. Then he slapped Teal'c on the arm in farewell, shook hands with Major Carter, nodded to Narim, and then turned to Doctor Jackson. He squeezed his shoulders briefly then stood back, saying sternly, "Just for once, do what the Colonel tells you, don't touch anything you're not supposed to, wander off, or start making nice with the natives." He straightened his blue BDU jacket automatically, reminding Teal'c of an anxious mother sending her child off for his first day of schooling. "Remember, not everyone who wants to show you his etchings is interested in mythology. And be careful. Don't go into any new ruins until someone with a gun has told you it's clear. Okay?"

Doctor Jackson sighed in resignation and Teal'c presumed that he was often subjected to fussing tirades of this kind by the older man. "Yes, Kawalsky. I promise to look both ways before I cross the road as well."

"Well, that would be an improvement on your wandering across it with your head in a book the way you usually do."

Teal'c thought with some relief that neither he nor O'Neill at their most absurdly over-protective had ever made such a public spectacle of themselves and Daniel Jackson as Major Kawalsky was doing now. The young man darted them an embarrassed glance to see if they were watching the Major's display, murmuring, "Kawalsky, please, I'll be fine."

"Check your bootlaces. Double knot them this time. And take a coat. Doc never had a coat. I swear wherever he is he'll have pneumonia by now." Kawalsky rubbed his forehead as if to ward off a headache and Teal'c saw a shadow pass across his face, the raw anxiety for the lost Daniel Jackson he was barely able to suppress increased by his obvious conviction that if he let this young man out of his sight he was going to vanish too. He gave the young man a last pat on the shoulder before briskly wishing them all luck and walking straight-backed down the corridor. Ten yards down the gray passageway he turned and said, "And once you've got him back, put him on a goddamned leash, will ya?" He looked at Doctor Jackson again and shook his head. "And I swear to God if anything happens to our Daniel while he's in your universe I will come and hunt you down like a goddamned ashrak. Do I make myself clear?"

Teal'c smiled for what felt like the first time in days, inclined his head and said, "Indeed."

***

O'Neill found it odd to have everyone looking at him as if he were a ghost when he knew he was alive and well. Doc had told him about the time he had slipped out of phase and become invisible and inaudible to everyone he knew except his insane grandfather. He had described what it felt like when people walked right through you without knowing you were there. Right now, O'Neill thought he might have preferred that to the way everybody kept staring at him. They were doing double-takes when they looked at Daniel too, then getting that look on their faces he had quickly learned to dread, that expression of sorrow and regret. 

The Janet Fraiser in this world obviously didn't dislike O'Neill the way she disliked him in his universe. She had been very gentle with him during his physical, a wistful look in her eyes as she examined him and clearly wished that he was the other O'Neill, not this stranger with her friend's face, but still kind to him for his own sake. But to Daniel she had been even kinder, brisk and good-humored and doting at the same time, surprised by the place where his appendix scar wasn't, fingers brushing the skin there lightly and warning him that he must monitor his own health very carefully in case his appendix was also building up for implosion. When she looked up at Daniel out of those big brown eyes, chest heaving a little under the white coat with her anxiety over the prospect of Daniel failing to report a fever or persistent feeling of nausea the way the Daniel from her dimension evidently had, then he'd finally got what the other guys saw. Finally understood why Kawalsky was always checking into sickbay even if all he had was a splinter in his finger in the hope that Doc Fraiser might kiss it better for him. Or at least make him the center of her attention while she was bandaging him up. When she was being nice to you, Janet Fraiser pretty much took the breath away, and although he had felt an instinctive clench of hostility when her slim fingers were anxiously palpitating Daniel's appendix area for any swelling or tenderness, he could forgive her a lot for looking so beautiful as she fussed over his Daniel.

They were all very kind to his Daniel, albeit inclined to treat him like a child, always offering him chocolate and cookies and the inevitable mugs of coffee. They seemed to think that because this version of Daniel Jackson looked the same way theirs had done a few years before, this one was somehow younger than theirs. He sometimes felt that what his Daniel represented to them was a chance to make amends for the past, as if they could somehow undo any wrongs that might have been done to the Daniel they knew by being extra kind to this one. But it didn't work that way. He had been as kind and loving as anyone could be to this Daniel but it didn't make a pinch of difference to the way he'd treated that other one.

His Daniel, in his turn, was being very kind to the Carter from this dimension, and if he hadn't felt so damned sorry for her himself, O'Neill might have felt a little jealous. She was beautiful after all. He'd got used to his own Carter and they kind of annoyed each other a lot of the time. They were different kinds of soldiers, she was all book-learning and rule-following whereas he had always preferred to play it by ear. They had a lot of mutual respect for one another's abilities, but there had never been the slightest spark of attraction between them. It had taken them a while to get fond of one another, to see past the flakiness she perceived in him and for him to see past the rigidity he saw in her, before they could accept that there was a lot more to the other than met the eye. It wasn't until the whole Tok'ra business that he'd realized Captain Knowitall was someone he'd gotten a lot fonder of than he'd thought, that it hurt like hell to think of her being a Goa'uld now, and that it had been one hell of a relief to get her back more or less unscathed when they'd thought her gone for good. And after that she'd seemed somehow, ironically, more human, even though her blood now had naquadah running through it and there was a protein marker in her somewhere that sent out a beacon to every Goa'uld in the galaxy that she'd once been like them. When they'd met Martouf and he'd watched her light up like a schoolgirl as they walked around one another, hardly daring to believe the other one was real, he'd felt positively fond of her, indulgent as an uncle with a favorite niece. This Carter was different, not least because she was halfway to being a basket case. It had made him realize that he was damned good for the Carter in his dimension because he would never have let the one he knew get to this point. Everyone kept tip-toeing around her, talking in soothing tones, when what she needed was for someone to tell her plain and simple that she wasn't superhuman and it therefore wasn't her fault if she couldn't solve any problem, couldn't right every wrong.

Daniel was more or less telling her that, but he was doing it gently over broken cookies and squares of imported chocolate while they waited for her father to get to the meeting point and then send them word.

She'd been helped straight away by the fact the tracking device gave her something to do. As soon as they'd arrived back in the right dimension on Tollana, it had started to bleep. He'd told Narim crossly he thought they ought to make it function trans-dimensionally and if he'd known it only sent its signal across one lousy universe he would never have bothered stealing it. But he hadn't been able to hide his relief when they'd seen that green pulse on the little blue screen of the tracking device. A red pulse would have meant the tracking device was functioning but the person into which it had been implanted was not. Green was very, very good in this instance. And, he had to admit that although he loved Daniel and would never ever look at anyone else again, when the relieved and ecstatic Carter had thrown her arms around his neck and kissed him right on the mouth, soft lips against his own, soft breasts against his chest, he hadn't exactly minded and his groin had actually twitched. It was just as well she'd done that really because the amount of time his Daniel had spent with her since they got here, he would have been wanting to punch her out if he hadn't seen for himself she was ready to throw her arms around even a total stranger's neck in her relief at hearing that her Daniel was alive. And yes, he'd been incredibly relieved when they'd got that confirmation himself. He'd been all knotted up inside with anxiety from when they'd first given him the news that the guy who he'd first seen unconscious at his feet in a Goa'uld prison cell might now be a corpse. He knew this universe's Hammond thought he was a heartless Lothario who'd 'wham bam, thank you mister'ed their Daniel halfway to a broken heart before dumping him, but he was never going to be able to explain to people just how fond he had been of that guy. It had been for both their sakes that he'd called it a day. Because that Daniel had deserved better than being screwed by someone who didn't love him with all his heart, and because as long as he was confusing things between them, Daniel was never going to admit to his own O'Neill how he really felt. He was between a rock and a hard place at the moment. If he protested how much the lost Daniel had meant to him he put that look of sorrow in his own Daniel's eyes, if he didn't, they'd think he was a user who had never appreciated just how special the Daniel from their dimension was. He figured it was a lose-lose situation and held his tongue.

His own Daniel was being very quiet. He was sweet to O'Neill, not at all pissy – the way he could get sometimes when things didn't go the way he liked – but very gentle and supportive. The way you would be with someone who was worried about a loved one. He didn't understand how after all they'd been through together, Daniel couldn't know that he was the one he loved, had always been the one he loved. But he still didn't seem to know that. He'd been secure and happy for a few weeks, that was all, and known himself to be the center of O'Neill's world, but all it had taken was a mention of the other Daniel, some proof that O'Neill still cared for him, and he'd gone right back to assuming that the other Daniel must be the real love of O'Neill's life. Which made his behavior right now heartbreakingly heroic, because no one had done more to help the other Carter find these guys than he had. She and Narim had gone nearly loco trying to match up a configuration on a Tollan device with the 'gate system as set up on the SGC computers, and Daniel had sat there with them the whole time while they spouted incomprehensible gobbledegook. Daniel was the one who had seen those patterns in the star systems which they knew too much to see, pointing out that it didn't matter what the logarithms were telling them, not to worry about matrixes and vectors or whatever math-hell they were talking about, just to match up the two patterns, find a correlation in the overall picture that made some kind of sense. 

O'Neill didn't think Carter had slept for about seventy-two hours straight and Narim and Daniel had sat up in that control room with her, inputting data, drinking coffee, swearing quietly in a variety of languages – including Tollanan – when the calculations hadn't come out right. And then abruptly they'd cracked it. Laid one pattern down on top of another and managed to retrieve the 'gate coordinates for where those two lost travelers had been accidentally sent.

He didn't think anyone had been truly surprised when the seventh chevron had failed to engage, but there had still been a collective slump of disappointment.

But Carter was as hyped up on caffeine as Daniel by that point and she'd only taken a few seconds to bow her head in despair before she was insisting that it didn't matter that they couldn't get there by 'gate travel, of course they couldn't get there by 'gate travel, if the 'gate had been working, O'Neill and Daniel would be back by now, and didn't everyone see this was a _good_ thing because it meant it probably wasn't imprisonment or infirmity preventing them from 'gateing home, just a blowout from the overload of power when they'd been sent through there in the first place. And now permission to contact the Tok'ra, General, she was sure they'd be happy to lend them a ship. 

The slightly manic light in her eyes told O'Neill that if the Tok'ra thought about _not_ lending them a ship they were going to regret it because Carter was going to be straight over to Vorash stringing people up by their reproductive organs until they changed their minds. Luckily, the Tollan had managed to get a message through that day and the Tok'ra had declared themselves delighted to lend the Tau'ri a ship and to send Jacob along to pilot her. They hadn't even asked for any first-born children in exchange, reminding O'Neill once again that the Tok'ra were occasionally a lot more human than they liked to let on. Either that or they had gone soft over Daniel as well. He thought that was equally possible. As soon as word came from Jacob that he had landed on the next planet in the 'gate system, they could travel out there to meet him, then they'd all take a tel'tak to go and pick O'Neill and Doc up from wherever they'd been stranded.

When he thought of the Daniel who had once been his lover alone with that other O'Neill, he did feel a prickling of jealousy, but he bit it down. The important thing was that Daniel should be okay, and at least the other O'Neill was a combat experienced veteran of black ops and myriad weird shit who ought to be able to keep him alive. And this O'Neill was in love with someone else now. That alpha male competitive side certainly hadn't looked too edifying on the other O'Neill and it didn't feel any more evolved coming from him. There was a part of him that still thought no one could look after Daniel the way he could, and that went for any Daniel in any universe, except the truth was that on their last mission Daniel had looked after himself, and it was Teal'c who'd saved him from Heru'ur, not O'Neill.

His Daniel had told this dimension's Teal'c all about it, what a wonderful guy his other universe counterpart was, Daniel's blue eyes shining behind his spectacles the way they did when he was truly enthused. O'Neill had felt another spasm of jealousy and had to remind himself firmly that to Daniel Teal'c was a kind of father figure, the hero-worship was just something they were all going to have to live with, and if Daniel was guilty of it where Teal'c was concerned, so too were half the Jaffa of Chulak who had elevated the guy to minor deity status and elected him their leader. O'Neill always felt he was being weighed and found wanting by the Teal'c in his own dimension, the man had a way of looking him over that was too reminiscent of a disappointed father whose favorite child had hooked up with a hoodlum. He suspected it was going to take at least a decade of Daniel-worship on his part before Teal'c began to cut him a little slack. 

It had been worth the Teal'c of his world being such a godlike hero figure though just to see the look on the face of the Teal'c of this world when Daniel told him about the guy and the way he had risked everything to rescue Daniel from Heru'ur. The most extraordinary expression of relief had spread over the Jaffa's face, as if a great burden had been lifted from his back.

"Is something wrong?" Daniel asked gently.

Teal'c shook his head. "No, Doctor Jackson. It is only that when all one's other selves are men of evil one cannot help wondering if the same darkness…"

"I doubt any of them were evil, Teal'c." Daniel looked horrified at the idea. "I've only met two of you but you both seem men of great courage and honor to me. Those other versions of you must be good men at heart as well, I expect it was just some fork in the road that sent them down the wrong path."

O'Neill loved Daniel's childlike certainties too much to want to interfere with them, but he and Teal'c exchanged a glance and he knew they were both remembering that Teal'c who had beaten Daniel so brutally, blasted a death-sized hole in O'Neill's chest, and been about to fuck Daniel raw when the Teal'c in front of him had killed the sonofabitch stone dead. He rather doubted that guy had been a good man at heart. On the other hand this Teal'c had sacrificed everything he had, position, preferment, home, family, with no hope of any gain for himself, just because he couldn't stand by and watch innocents die one more time. And the Teal'c who had saved Daniel from Heru'ur was a genuine hero among men. O'Neill said gently, "I think there's good and bad in all of us, Daniel. In some realities the bad wins out, in some the good. It's even possible that in some universes there is a Jack O'Neill who isn't perfect in every way."

Daniel moistened his lips. "Surely not."

O'Neill sighed. "Hard though it is for you to believe, even that could happen."

"Apparently you're married to Sam in some of them."

O'Neill wrinkled his nose in disbelief then remembered the soft squish of Major Carter's breasts against his chest as she hugged him, the warm pressure of her lips against his mouth, and had to acknowledge that an O'Neill who thought with his dick more than his commonsense and didn't mind hooking up with someone who talked incomprehensible gibberish to him twenty-four hours a day, might well be tempted by Carter's undeniable assets. "Only in universes where you're not on the Stargate program, I bet, and that version of me doesn't know you exist."

Daniel frowned at that and O'Neill thought how cute he looked when he frowned and how if Teal'c hadn't been in the room with them he would have had to kiss him. "I don't like to think of there being universes where you and I haven't met, Jack." He looked up at O'Neill then and the expression in his eyes took O'Neill's breath away. Daniel didn't even know he was looking like that, he was sure, so wistful and so painfully in love. 

O'Neill darted Teal'c a begging look and the Jaffa immediately got to his feet and said he needed to go and speak to Major Carter. O'Neill barely waited for the door to close behind him before he had Daniel in his arms and was kissing him.

Daniel came out of the kiss slowly, eyelids fluttering, dazed and a little sad as he opened his eyes. "What brought that on?"

"I just don't like thinking of there being a universe where we haven't met either." O'Neill stroked his hair back from his face, hooking the dark golden strands behind his ear the way he always tried to, only to see the heavy bangs fall forward again, the way they always did. He knew there was a security camera watching them somewhere but this wasn't their universe and he didn't care about what people from a different dimension saw or thought of them. "I love you more than I have ever loved anyone or any thing in the world and if I ever lost you I would swallow my gun the same day."

Daniel looked at him in horror and then pushed him away. "Don't say that, Jack."

"Why not? It's the truth."

"Because true love ought to make you want to love life so much you don't ever want to give it up."

"Does it say that on the can or something?"

Daniel moistened his lips again, shock and humor warring for his attention. "Yes, actually it does. Right before the list of ingredients."

O'Neill moved in closer again, not touching him this time, just bending his head so Daniel could feel the warmth of his mouth against his lips. "What ingredients would those be?"

There was that look of helpless adoration from those bluer-than-blue eyes, the one that turned his knees to water, his heart to hopeless mush, his blood to the greatest brandy ever sipped beside a warm winter fire. Daniel said faintly, "I seem to remember an 'O'Neill' somewhere in the mix."

"Funny," O'Neill brushed his lips very gently across the younger man's. "I swear on the can I opened, I only remember a Daniel Jackson…."

***


	4. Paradise Lost

So dear I love him, that with him all deaths  
I could endure, without him live no life.  
John Milton _Paradise Lost_ (bk. IX, l. 832)

III: Paradise Lost

 

Today was the first day when he had been able to dress himself without Jack hovering over him while he did it. There had also been the small luxury of being able to empty his bladder and bowels without Jack calling across to him every ten seconds to ask if he wanted any help. A part of him wondered if Jack had actually liked him being helpless, something in the man that needed to be needed going into overdrive when he'd had a genuine invalid under his sole care. This morning as he enjoyed being able to wipe his own ass for the first time in far too many days, he'd had a jolt of realization about the nature of those infinite possibilities being played out in those infinite mirror universes. In some of them Charlie had survived, brain damaged but breathing, and Jack had given up his job to look after him. He'd thought in the past that Jack would have hated that, fretted at those restraints on his freedom, but now he knew he would have preferred it to losing his child, would have made a career out of taking care of his altered son, would have told him stories on the off chance Charlie could hear and understand him, would have taken him to a beach like this and shown him the sea, told him how the sun came up in the morning, why the dog star shone the way it did. In another universe Sara and Jack were walking across the sands right now, pushing a wheelchair, the Air Force receding like a half-forgotten dream, and Jack was changed but contented, not repining every day because his child was brain-damaged, just grateful to have him at all. 

He'd learned that about Jack over the past few weeks, that Jack wanted those he cared about to live whatever, would fight to keep them breathing however barely they might seem to be clinging to life. There was a nurturing part of him that rarely got to see the light of day that found a purpose in feeding and cleaning and ministering to the sickly, a patience deeper than the Grand Canyon for those who truly needed him which lay just beneath the boredom which was triggered by five minutes of any subject that didn't rivet his attention from the start. Jack had always been like an archaeological wonder, simple as an old mastaba on the surface but, underneath, as complex as the burial chambers built by Ramases the Great to honor his fifty sons.

He'd asked Jack for a guided tour of the island, having to sound very firm on the subject before Jack decided he was still too weak and could only sit very quietly, shaded from the sun and out of the reach of low flying coconuts, before being spoon fed fish soup stuffed with more healing herbs than a witch's cauldron when the plague was in town. He'd made it clear he was very bored with lying down in the dark, thinking healing thoughts, and not exciting himself. He was ready to be dazzled by the brave new world in which they found themselves and promised not to keel over from the excitement if a wave was actually permitted to wash across the tips of his bare toes. Jack had compromised by saying he would give him a guided tour of the beach and Daniel, realizing that was the best offer he was going to get, had accepted.

"This wet blue stuff is the sea. This powdery stuff is called sand. The things with fins are called 'fish'. The big heavy thing that just narrowly avoided giving you a concussion is called a 'coconut' and…"

"Jack. When I said I wanted the guided tour. I didn't actually mean the kindergarten version."

O'Neill gave Daniel his best 'you astonish me' look. "You were in that damned shelter so long doing the dying thing I thought you might have forgotten the names of some of this stuff."

Daniel was so weak that walking was still difficult and involved a lot of leaning heavily on Jack or, as in the last few days when he had groped his way back to some kind of independence, leaning almost as heavily on a stick. The fact Jack had found him the stick had taken off some of the feeling of independence it gave him, as did the way Jack hovered by his elbow looking to grab him if he so much as swayed, but it had also given him a warm glow to go with his irritation. Now he gave Jack a level look then bent down to pluck something from the golden sands. He tested the weight of the smooth stone in his hand. "Oh look, a rock. See the rock. See Jack's head. See Jack duck…"

O'Neill gave him a grin of idiotic proportions. "You know you love me really."

Daniel returned his gaze and sighed. He let the stone fall to the sand with a dull thud. "You know I really do."

That was when Jack gently put his hands to each side of Daniel's face. Daniel closed his eyes and felt warm dry lips brush against his, his lips parted instinctively and a tongue slipped into his mouth, curling around his own tentatively. It was a very gentle kiss, but no one could have called it fraternal, platonic, or anything other than romantic. Daniel swayed and at once hands gripped his arms to hold him steady, but the kiss only deepened, a hand slipped to the back of his head to hold him still as the tongue explored his mouth more thoroughly. When it was finally withdrawn, Daniel opened his eyes to find Jack looking at him like a child who had just done something naughty and was afraid of being told off.

"I know what you think of me," Jack said hastily.

"You do?" Daniel was still swaying a little, everything zinging in confused reaction, his mouth still tingling from the feel of Jack's tongue, heart pounding, sweat gathering in a puddle in the hollow of his hands, his groin was stirring restlessly, wanting to be touched, his skin prickling with the need for contact.

"That I'm territorial. That I've made SG-1 my home turf and I don't want anyone trespassing. That every time it looks as if some outsider might stray over the boundary line I start staking a claim to the person they might look like carrying off. That it has to do with my own…comfort zone, not the people inside it."

Daniel raised his eyebrows. "That's what I think, is it?"

Jack nodded. "But that's not true."

Daniel shrugged. "I guess I was wrong again then."

"What I feel for you isn't to do with not wanting to lose a part of who I think I am, of the security of my team. It's to do with who you are. How I feel about you."

"Who have you been talking to?"

Jack pulled a face. "I had a couple of sessions with MacKenzie. Hammond was worried about my reaction to you and shit-head from the other dimension. He thought I needed some anger management counseling."

Daniel regarded him levelly. "I thought we'd already established that MacKenzie was a fuckwit?"

"That's not a word."

"So 'shit-head' is a word but 'fuckwit' isn't?"

"I was confused." Jack looked down at the sand in slight accusation, as if it had somehow contributed to his confusion. "After that business with the other…me." The grimace looked as if it was trying and failing not to turn into a snarl. Daniel could practically hear the sound of teeth gritting before Jack continued: "I didn't know what I wanted. What you wanted. What I wanted you to want. What…"

"Jack." Daniel grimaced in exasperation. "You suck at this."

Jack held up an accusing finger. "That's exactly what MacKenzie said."

"What else did he say?"

"That he thought our sessions should end."

"Why?" Daniel wondered idly if there would ever come a time when getting information from Jack didn't bring 'blood' and 'stones' quite so strongly to mind. On the other hand he'd been the one to stop him in full flow a moment ago. Why? Because he'd been afraid the man might be about to tell him something he didn't want to hear? The man had just kissed him, it was true. But he had never doubted that Jack had a libido, didn't take to celibacy well, or wouldn't be irritated enough about what the other Jack had done to Daniel not to want to try it himself, if only to prove to both of them that the other guy had nothing to offer Daniel that this Jack couldn't supply. If Jack had been a dog he would have spent half his life pissing on his own gatepost to keep off rivals, that was just the way he was.

"Because we were straying too close to 'don't ask, don't tell' territory."

Daniel found his heart was beating too fast again. "I told you he was a fuckwit."

Jack gave him a look of exasperation. "You're not helping."

"I'm scared." He softened it with a smile but he was afraid the panic in his eyes was betraying him. This mattered too much and he was too weak from his illness to deal with another disappointment, besides the sea was too loud and the sun was too bright and the beach was too sprinkled with remnants of crushed cliff-face ground to red powder in the golden sand.

Jack gave him that look which turned him to helpless mush, making him feel like some schoolboy with a crush, there had always been that knife edge in their relationship, the fear that if he ever let go he could find himself hero-worshipping a man whose ethics he wasn't even sure of, who could bury his goodness beneath a mask of military necessity, become voluntarily deaf to the voice of his own conscience. If Daniel ever let go they could both be lost, they couldn't afford to love each other absolutely, they fucked up too often, made too many mistakes, they had to be able to keep that critical distance between one another so they could call the other one on whichever mistake they were about to make next. As Jack took a step towards him, Daniel felt his critical distance dissolving like salt in the sea.

Jack's gaze was fixed on him unwaveringly, daring him to blink. "You're a brave guy, Daniel. Face the fear. Three days ago I told you I was in love with you. I'm still waiting for some kind of response."

"I can't think of a response that doesn't involve me looking like a guppy," Daniel protested. He could admit it only to himself, but the truth was the other Jack had hurt him. He'd tried not to get emotionally connected, fought against it, but still the man had come to represent a stability and affection to him he had felt he'd lost with his own Jack. When that had been withdrawn he'd felt emotionally raw and bereft. If he let go now he was going to go into freefall.

The sunlight was shining on the hairs on Jack's left arm, the sun-browned skin crisscrossed with scab-covered cuts, self-inflicted wounds. Daniel thought about the man doggedly cutting open his own skin, slapping down stinging leaves and burning pulp on open cut after open cut, not knowing if this one would give him blood poisoning or make his arm swell to the size of a watermelon, or only hurt like hell…

Hurt like hell… He'd thought sex with a man would be like that and the thought of it still made him simultaneously wince and shiver. Buggery. Sodomy. Anal intercourse. Someone should really come up with a prettier word for it. They told you it hurt, but it didn't, not really, not if you were drunk and your partner was skilful, too complex an act to explain to women, who wouldn't understand how difficult it was for a guy to be receptive, to be entered, or to a man who wouldn't understand why you would choose to take your pleasure that way. But it had made him feel alive in a way he couldn't explain, more in touch with his body than he'd ever been before, aware of every nerve ending, every cell. Giving himself up to the possibility of that pain, embracing the fear, relaxing into the initial discomfort, that lance of fire inside him, then finding the knife-edge of ecstasy that was the prostate-jangling reward for trust. He thought of himself in that hotel room, how it must have looked to Jack as he gazed through the window in shocked revulsion. Daniel jolting in time to the rhythm of another man's passion. It must have looked ugly even though it had felt so damned good at the time. He'd given that Jack everything the man wanted in the bedroom, too new to the experience to have an opinion about what he did and didn't like, so willing to be guided by the one of them who knew what he was doing. But he'd barely told him anything about himself, wriggled out of verbal intimacy while spreading his legs for any physical kind the guy wanted. 

The words came in a rush. "The other you broke up with me because he was in love with the Daniel in his dimension. He also said he couldn't deal with always being seen as second best." He wrenched his gaze from the ripple of the sea and made himself look into Jack's brown eyes. "He said I would never fall in love with him while I was so in love with you. He said that Jack O'Neills and Daniel Jacksons weren't meant to have sex without love. It unbalanced the cosmos."

Jack kept looking at him, face unreadable, and then something that looked like relief washed across his face. "Well, much as I hate to agree with that creep slime from the planet jerk-off, he was right."

"I see those anger management sessions really paid off."

"Dress it up any way you like, Daniel, the sonofabitch fucked you then dumped you. I don't like people who do that to my friends. Particularly not friends I love and who are in love with me, even if getting them to admit it is like pulling teeth."

Thinking for the hundredth time that Jack must have been at the back of the queue when the tact was being handed out, Daniel looked around the beach for inspiration. "We're stuck here together, just the two of us, possibly forever. What do we do if we have a relationship and then…break up? Divide up the island and never speak to each other again?"

Jack rolled his eyes. "Daniel, just cast your mind back over all the dumb, mean, unjust things you and I have said and done to one another over the past few years. Did it ever add up to more than a few days of yelling or sulking? You got over my punching you. I got over your pointing a gun at me. What are you planning to do to me in this place that is so horrible I could never get over it? And how the hell can we be unfaithful to one another when there's no one else around here except seagulls?"

Daniel held up his right hand. "There's always this guy."

Jack stepped forward and gazed into his eyes. "He may be good but I'm better."

Finding his throat was dry and his brain suddenly blood-drained, Daniel croaked, "Prove it."

The oddest expression washed across Jack's face, tender and excited all at once, a flicker of what might have been arousal so swiftly quelled. Then the man leaned forward and brushed his lips very gently across Daniel's. Not at all what he'd expected after such a challenge, warm lips just tantalizing his, then a tongue touching his lower lip, his mouth opening in response, fingers against his face, touching him so lightly, rough tips delicate against his skin. It frightened him to be treated like something so fragile, his own mortality briefly waltzing around them on the beach, Jack was kissing him like this because he'd almost died, kissing him so gently because he had become something precious and vulnerable that Jack was afraid to bruise, kissing him at all because nothing but near-death would have brought them to this point.

He felt a little dizzy abruptly, the sunlight, and the shore, and the music of the waves, the beach starting to tilt. He'd almost died. Worse, he'd almost been trapped forever in a friendship that could never advance in any direction, poisoning itself with frustration.

"I…" For a linguist he seemed to be suffering from a terrible shortage of words. "You… Me…"

Jack just said, "I know."

An instant later Jack was lowering him carefully to the sand before lying beside him. The sand was wet from the spray of the incoming tide and he felt it stick to his skin. It felt damp and warm at the same time. He felt the same way, a moistness between his legs, between his shoulder blades, prickling on his palms, the perspiration of anticipation, the precum of excitement. Hot and sticky and wet and willing. And scared. Much more frightened now than he had ever been with the other Jack, because nothing had been riding on that except that it might hurt, but this might rip his heart in two, this might do something terminal to their friendship, to lose Jack seemed suddenly so much worse than losing anything else, because if he lost Jack he would also lose himself.

A sudden spurt of panic made his heart clatter in his chest and then Jack's hand was stroking gently across his breastbone, as if his anxiety attack was an animal in need of soothing. "I know and I'm scared too."

Daniel said breathlessly, "Don't do it unless it's the right thing to do."

Jack was lying on his side beside him, looking at him with such intensity, such frank curiosity, reaching out to brush a lock of hair back from his forehead, looking at his eyes, his mouth, as if he had never seen him before, yet knew every line, every fleck, every flaw. "What would make it the wrong thing?"

Daniel felt tears sting salt against his eyes. The sun was too bright. The world was too unstable. The ground was rippling beneath him like a lion flexing its claws. "Anything that makes us…not…like each other any more." He couldn't say 'love': too presumptuous, too sentimental. 

Jack said, "I will always like you." And it made his heart squeeze tight in his chest because it was said with such softness and the look in Jack's eyes was full of love. Where had the look come from? And what had he done that it should be aimed at him?

He couldn't think of a response. His heart was pounding too fast with excitement, torn between anticipation and anxiety, wanting everything at once and afraid of taking some fatal misstep that would ruin everything forever. He could feel himself freezing into his usual passivity because things had just gone down an emotional byway he wasn't sure he could manage. This could be the beginning of something wonderful, or the end of their friendship. He was so afraid of screwing up, he didn't do anything, just lay there, breathing too fast and gazing up at Jack, like a deer in front of headlights. How was Jack ever going to see past the panic and immobility to the wanting beneath?

Jack reached out gently and touched his face, running a finger down his cheek, down his jaw, then slowly across his mouth. Daniel let the tip of his tongue flicker across his lips to touch the salt of Jack's fingertip, a tiny movement but at least something that spoke of encouragement. There was so much warmth in those brown eyes, such tenderness there. Jack bent his head very slowly and brushed his lips against Daniel's and the world went black for a moment as he closed his eyes, luxuriating in that dry pressure against his mouth. Jack's tongue lapped against his lips, delicate as a cat licking cream, and Daniel opened his mouth, felt the tongue slip between his lips, then the tips of their tongue touched, a strange metallic flavor to the contact which sent a thrill of reaction through him. Jack's fingers carded so gently through his hair, and the tongue probed deeper, wrapped around his own, and was then withdrawn. He reached for it, mouth straining after that stolen heat, but Jack was leaning up to kiss his brow, his eyelids, his cheekbone, then nuzzling at his ear, a wet warmth making him shiver with pleasure. Then kisses traced the line from his cheekbone to his jaw, lingered over his mouth in a brief, gentle but determined entrance by a questing tongue, his lips bruised so very tenderly, the warm cavern of his mouth explored. And then he couldn't suppress another shiver as a work-roughened hand slid up under his t-shirt and a thumb was brushed across his left nipple. It hardened at once and his back arched, but the deepening kiss kept him still, the other hand stroking across the smooth skin of his chest to soothe him, a wordless murmur from Jack of the kind one might use to gentle a flighty horse. Then the tongue slipped from his mouth and his ear was nuzzled again. 

"Can I touch you?"

Daniel started at the breathless murmur against his ear, back arching in automatic response. As he took one last look at the man asking the question he could feel the helplessness sweeping through him. He took in the silver-gray short-cropped hair which had once been brown, that he had touched on the Nox world, hesitant about doing so in case Jack bit his head off when he woke up. Back in the days when this moment seemed as remote and as impossible as harnessing the light from a shooting star. When he'd loved only Sha're, and Jack had been this guy he didn't know that well, who he took for granted, was often surprised and disappointed by, or surprised and impressed by, who seemed to have all the answers yet wouldn't always let Daniel ask the questions. Who didn't care about the interesting things, and yet always kept his eye on the important things. And there were the eyes, brown and haunted and capable of more warmth and kindness than anyone he had ever known. Eyes that could make him melt if they looked at him with tenderness and could make him bleed inside when they looked at him without liking. If he let go he was going to fall, and he wasn't going to stop falling. He was on the highwire now and he was losing his balance. He had to trust Jack to catch him and although there had been a time when trusting Jack had been as instinctive as breathing, now he wasn't sure, so much anger between them, so much coldness… He caught sight of the cuts on the man's arm again and realized that Jack had never let him fall. Even when they'd argued, even when there had been hostility between them, there had never been a time when Jack wouldn't have risked his life to save him, hadn't looked as if his world would end if he lost him. Abruptly every inch of his skin was prickling with wanting, needing to feel Jack's skin against his, taste his sweat, feel his warmth. He leaned in against the man trying to kiss him but a hand on his chest again gently stilled him. "Can I touch you?"

"Yes." He could barely get the word out, trying to sound deep-voiced and in control but speech escaping him in a breathless whisper.

The hand slid across his chest, so gentle on his skin, the friction of the roughened fingertips against his body making Daniel gasp even though they only traced faint circles on his chest, then abdomen. Jack kept kissing him behind the ear, nuzzling into the lobe, licking inside the ear in a way that made him shiver with longing, then another trail of gentle kisses down his face, to his mouth, while the fingers continued their lazy circles lower and lower.

Then – oh god – so warm, rough-skinned yet so gentle – fingers between his legs, then back to his abdomen, touching his thighs, a soft stroking of that vulnerable flesh, briefly cupping his balls. An incoherent gasp from his own throat. So hard, so treacherously hard. His face burned. Jack kissed his brow, like someone dispensing absolution, and then he realized that was what the man was doing, giving him permission to be aroused.

"It's okay…" The fingers stroked the inside of his thigh gently, circling on the soft flesh there. It was so long since anyone had touched him like that, had known him well enough to touch him like that.

He heard Jack's breath catch and realized he was aroused too. The man said again, "Can I touch you…?"

Even though he was already touching him, one hand brushing his stomach, the other stroking down his leg, Daniel nodded, gulped, managed a faint, "Yes…"

Wet heat closed around his cock. He moaned, arched, gasped. Suction, soft yet insistent, and fingers caressing his testicles, unbearable shivers of sensation, everything so strained and heated and trembling with need. A finger burrowed deep. He moaned again, loud but so swiftly swallowed by the sea. His testicles were kissed and sucked, and trembled in their sacs. Then his cock was licked, sucked again, taken in deep, and he was lost, it had been too long since he had known this, felt this, and this was Jack, how could it be Jack? Hands held his thighs down, Jack's hands, warm and so familiar, hands that had gentled him a hundred times before, yet never held him in just this way, firm yet gentle, and the suction greedy now, determined, swallowing him, his cock squeezed with painful pleasure. He was in Jack's mouth, that warmth and wetness, Jack's mouth. Impossible yet deliriously happening.

"This is a dream…" he managed. It made so much more sense as a dream. When he woke up he would be back at the SGC and he would feel so empty then because for one brief fantasy he had been given everything only to have it snatched from him as his eyes opened – 

Then Jack sucked him harder, held him down as he bucked, and felt that familiar prickling up the backs and fronts of his thighs, a pleasurable searing, from his balls halfway up his spine, before his body turned itself out, and he was swallowed whole.

He was noisy enough to make his throat burn and came around whimpering softly as if he had been hurt, to find Jack stroking his abdomen again, kissing his brow, his temple, inhaling the scent of his skin.

"You're alive," Jack said. "You're alive, Daniel." Then he pulled him in close to let Daniel gasp into his neck, eyes stinging with salt, Jack's body seeking his greedily, eager to let skin touch skin. He was kissed deep and passionately as the sea rolled over them, a shock of cold, but Jack barely paused in the midst of his kissing, tongue questing, eyes full of certainty. Daniel tasted himself in the other man's mouth, bitter and salty, leaning into the older man as the sea splashed against them, still shuddering with the aftermath of so much pleasure after so much pain, open mouthed in blind response, tongue flexing feebly as he tried to return each kiss with interest, full of ferocious love in his heart which his body was too weak to translate.

"You need to rest."

He made an incoherent noise denoting disagreement. Wanting to stay like this, with the sea shocking him with its coldness while Jack's kisses bruised and tantalized his mouth. But Jack was quietly persistent. "We can swing from the light fittings tomorrow," the man whispered in his ear, the warm breath making him shiver with longing. 

He tried to argue but Jack only kissed him again, deep and tender and swallowing all his breath. Daniel couldn't deny that he felt weak but would have argued that was Jack's fault for making him come, something that could only be remedied by some hair of the dog repeat prescription medicine. This time when they kissed, the sand stuck to their wet skin and wetter clothing, dusting their bodies with golden grains. Daniel melted into the kiss, into the dry heat of Jack's urgent mouth, realizing how exhausted he felt, the aftermath of being ill for so long abruptly catching up with him now the orgasm high was receding. He clung to Jack, eyes closed, kissing and kissing, hungry but weak. Where their bodies touched, they smeared wet sand upon one another, granular handprints left on their receptive skin, when they rolled together they left the faint barring of ribcages, like the shadows of old shipwrecks. Jack's kisses were almost unbearably tender, tiny nibbles behind Daniel's ear, down his cheekbone, along his jaw, a gentle nuzzling at his throat. He kissed his mouth again, then murmured again, "You need to rest now."

Daniel opened his eyes. "Think I can't keep up with you, old man?"

"I know you can't." Jack gave him a last kiss and then got to his feet. "Come on, Shrapnel Boy, let's get the sand out of any unpleasant crevices and then you can sleep."

Abruptly so dazed with tiredness he could barely walk, Daniel found himself hauled gently to his feet so that Jack could splash him with sea water in a way he found disturbingly erotic. He watched the man swilling out his briefs in the sea, the cotton floating on the blue-green water like a sleeping dove, then using them to wash him down, Daniel starting with the shock of the wet cloth down his thighs, between his legs, wiped delicately between the crack of his ass. Then Jack's wet arm was around his wet body and the man was helping him to stumble back along the beach. 

As Daniel saw the dark entrance to the shelter he felt a flinch of revulsion. Despite his bouts of delirium he had too vivid memories of waking in there to the darkness, body racked with pain, joints aching with fever, mind a swirl of bleeding color, like a freshly-painted mural ruined by rainfall. Too sharp a memory still of straining his ears to hear past the song of the sea, the cry of the gulls, some discernible proof that he was not alone in this place, Jack not lying dead or dying somewhere he was too weak to reach, every atom in his body focused on the first crunch of feet on sand.

"Not there," Jack breathed gently in his ear. "Now you're finally house-trained you get to sleep in the nice shelter, with the windows and the pretty view."

"What?" Daniel was being moved away from the shelter but his brain couldn't keep pace with them not entering that place, the sweat and urine-stained leafy darkness might be unpleasant to him but it was also the nearest thing to home. His body had already been geared up for imminent collapse, forward motion seemed almost impossible.

They were rounding a spit of jungle which had ventured further out onto the beach. He knew the lagoon was beyond this western curve because Jack had told him, but he hadn't seen it yet. He could hardly put one foot in front of the other, realizing that Jack might have a point about his invalid status, not that he had any intention of admitting it to the man. Jack held him up, his arm a comforting strength around Daniel's body, for once not complaining about the extra weight being put on his knees. 

And then he saw the lagoon, a sweep of dazzling blueness, curving into the land, the beach beside it even more golden, even more untouched, and there was another manmade shelter, much bigger than the one he had been sleeping in, the doorway up stairs he couldn't have managed until now, everything woven and plaited and tied in to canes of stout bamboo. He hardly had time to admire the workmanship before Jack was urging him up the stairs and into the large light room. Giving him a solid shove from behind to help him battle the gravity drag of those ladder steps. The woven rush floor was soft and springy beneath his feet and the walls felt warm and cool at the same time, a south breeze floating in from one window but the sweep of the north wind that gusted in from the sea held off by the tight weave of the walls.

He looked at Jack and saw a mixture of pride and apprehension on his face. Jack said tentatively, "Do you like it?"

Daniel noticed they seemed to be unconsciously undergoing a rite of passage whereby Jack turned into a hunter-gatherer and he was trapped in the role of blushing bride, now being shown around the shiny new home the Man had built for him. The only blessing was that Jack hadn't actually carried him over the threshold. But the anxiety in Jack's eyes as he looked quickly around the shelter, seeing good workmanship but afraid Daniel might see something he had missed, got to him in a way the more tender caresses might not. "I love it," he said gently. "It's the most beautiful home I've ever had, and you're much smarter than you look."

Jack grinned at him then, apprehension banished and somewhat smug lordly protector expression back in spades. "So are you."

Daniel said conversationally, "I need to fall down now."

Jack led him over to the corner and there, in the darkest place with no windows, away from the door, and the breeze, was a sleeping pallet of soft woven rushes, a space blanket lying on top of the rushes, another one folded in readiness for covering him. "You can fall down here."

At the sight of the bed, Daniel's knees evidently decided they could crumple, and the room spun alarmingly, then arms were wrapped around him and he was being lowered carefully to the bed. Then Jack whispered in his ear: "You can try falling all you like, Daniel, just don't expect me not to catch you. Not every O'Neill wants to just fuck and go." As Jack kissed him in what he seemed to be trying to make a farewell, Daniel hung onto him determinedly and after a brief resistance the man sighed and lay down with him.

"I have to – " 

"No." Daniel could be firm about that at any rate, and dug his fingers tighter into Jack's t-shirt. "You're not going anywhere."

Jack sighed, and curled his body around Daniel's, slipping one hand under Daniel's t-shirt to rest it on his abdomen, stroking his skin very gently in tiny circling motions. "Go to sleep."

Daniel had so many things he needed to say, whole sentences he had half constructed yet seemed to have lost the knack of saying aloud. But ultimately it was to do with having agreed to whatever it was they had been discussing earlier, a throwing in the towel of resistance, an acceptance that they were one now, and looking at the tender expression in Jack's eyes, feeling the comfortable confidence of those fingers so lightly stroking his skin, feeling that kiss against his ear, he guessed he had nothing to say that Jack didn't know already.

"You're really annoying sometimes," he mumbled.

Jack kissed him again, on the mouth this time, a claiming kiss that banished all further argument on whether or not they were now just good friends or undoubtedly lovers. "That's why you love me."

Despite the definite hint of smugness in Jack's voice, Daniel felt no need to argue with him. Closing his eyes, he slept and carried with him the scent and warmth and comfort of Air Force colonel into his dreams.

 

O'Neill wondered what it would have been like if this had happened back at the SGC. Closing his eyes he tried to picture a courtship played out there. It would have been exciting, the danger of it, eyes across a briefing room table and the sudden flare of last night's desire revisited in a reflected memory. He would have been smug and dangerous, predatory and insecure. He imagined himself prowling the corridors sizing up possible opposition, hostile and edgy, then imagined the way his pulse would flutter and his skin would prickle with anticipation as he knocked upon that door, trying in vain to keep that smile from his face. Daniel looking up and the laser exchange of their glance, Daniel trying to sound all adult and deep-voiced in case anyone in the corridor was listening. Trying to be casual but dropping his pen on the floor, spilling his coffee. As they got close enough they would have been driven wild by the other's scent and the lingering echoes of their own aromas not quite washed off by a hasty shower before work before that heedless scramble for their own cars, dazed by post-coital euphoria and too little sleep. When they kissed it would have been like two warring tribes meeting on neutral ground.

There would have been rules. He would probably have been the one that made them. All the things they couldn't do. Rules he would have broken the first time he was alone in an office with Daniel with his heart beating too fast and that eager flexing between his legs that refused to be denied. He imagined dropping to aching knees right then, right there, and taking him into his mouth to the root, sucking him dry, turning him inside out, wanting Daniel to scream his name while knowing all the time he had to hang onto his silence somehow. He thought of notes left under windscreen wipers for not-so-secret rendezvous. A lot of bad acting. Teal'c and Carter looking at them sideways, Teal'c asking him if he was annoyed in some way with Daniel Jackson as he overcompensated for the sappy grin he had to suppress by too much offhanded grunting.

Except…in four years of unconscious foreplay they'd never got there, not even once. Not even when drunk and restless after a mission gone wrong, even with their bodies thwanging from an adrenaline overload, they had always stayed on the platonic freeway, speeding down the path of friendship with no more than a glance at the exit ramp leading to romance. Why did people always think they'd reached some kind of plateau where in this moment, in this age, they had reached their peak of self-knowledge? He had thought there was nothing left for him to discover about himself even as he waded deeper and deeper into the waters of self-delusion. It had taken so much to bring them to this point: losing the friendship, losing the object of desire, another version of himself doing things he'd never known he wanted to do in that seedy motel room on another world, and then this, all these days and nights of thinking Daniel was dying and he was going to be left alone without him forever, having realized too late that without him he didn't even want to go on. How stupid was he, anyway?

"Jack…?"

How could it still excite him to hear Daniel say his name when Daniel had said his name so many times in so many ways over the years? Yet it did. His heart was beating a little faster just from that confused murmur.

He bent and kissed him, in the salt-flavored darkness of the cabin, inhaling Daniel's scent as he did so. He smelled of the sunwarmed sand and the salt of the sea, and of his own arousal and completion from their earlier encounter on the beach. He knew he shouldn't like it so much, the way Daniel reached for him like that, half asleep and drowsy, still weak from illness and so much not himself, yet he liked to be needed this much, a part of him aching with loneliness at all the friends that they had lost when they were marooned here, another part triumphant because there was only him now, he was all that Daniel had left, and therefore there was no risk of boredom or distraction. Well, not until Daniel began to explore that ruined temple, of course…

"Go back to sleep."

"We could have sex." Daniel pressed in against him and began to lap at his collarbone in a maddeningly persistent way.

"No." O'Neill felt a warm hand reach under his shirt and caress his chest, playing with the hair there, brushing so lightly across his nipples. Daniel had such beautiful hands, long-fingered, sensitive and…sneaky. He grabbed a wrist that was straying too far south. "You need your sleep."

"I'm too horny to sleep."

Typical post-near-death-experience hormonal overload. The body might think it was willing but in reality it was still much too weak. O'Neill kissed the tantalizing fingers before firmly placing Daniel's hand back on his chest and holding it there. "The more you rest, the stronger you'll get, the stronger you get the more chance there is that we can have sex." He gasped then as a face burrowed determinedly at his groin, even through the cloth of his pants he had felt that lick of wet warmth, his cock was unfurling like a flag about to fly up the pole. "Daniel!"

Daniel began to giggle, in the glints of starlight making their way through the rush walls, O'Neill saw his skin bathed blue, eyelashes absurdly long. "You sound so shocked."

"I am shocked." O'Neill had to fight not to kiss him hard then start groping him the way he wanted to, his body wrapped against Daniel's, skin against skin, fingers caressing everything, tongues intertwined like mating snakes. God, no thoughts like that or he'd never be able to resist him. "You're a bad archaeologist and you won't get any fossils to play with if you don't get your beauty sleep."

Daniel 'humphed' sulkily as he lay back down. "How long are you going to keep treating me like an invalid?"

"As long as you _are_ an invalid, Daniel." He couldn't help kissing him, not when his mouth was right there. Daniel purred him against him then, sweet and almost submissive, the way he absolutely never was when he was well, the proof right there he was probably still running a temperature, in the way he curled close, rubbing his cheek against O'Neill's stubble, groin seeking groin.

"I sleep much better after I've come," Daniel whispered in his ear. O'Neill couldn't deny that was true. Sighing, he reached into Daniel's shorts and cupped him gently. It still felt strange to be able to touch him like this, something forbidden he shouldn't really be doing. Daniel gasped in his ear and the hot breath was tantalizing. He felt the weight of his testicles in his hand and stroked them gently with his thumb, so vulnerable and soft against his skin. Daniel shivered and hardened, and he stroked his shaft then, rubbing his thumb over the weeping tip. As Daniel groaned and thrust into his hand, he couldn't help thinking of what he he'd seen through that motel window, Daniel with his head back and the sweat trickling down his chest, the other O'Neill's tongue chasing a stray droplet, then the pulsing energy of his thrusts, so deep and hard and – 

He was biting his lip too hard to object when Daniel's hand closed around his own aching erection. They pumped each other while he wrestled with demons of jealousy, anger and a lust that frightened him a little. Was it sane to want someone this much at his age? He wanted Daniel to moan and gasp and scream his name as he came and kept on coming, and he wanted to shoot his load in the velvet warmth within him, feel him tighten around him as Daniel came, as his body gave him everything, without borders or barriers or doubts or lies.

"Oh god…" It was too fast, ripped from him, a fleeting starburst of pleasure before he had shot his bolt. He breathed raggedly for a moment then recovered his rhythm, stroking Daniel hard and fast so he could come as well, and they could sleep. Daniel gasped something incoherent in Abydonian into his ear, hot fluid gushed over his fingers, and then the younger man was slumped against him, sweat-sheened and panting. O'Neill kissed him gently, soothing him with murmured reassurances and gentle fingers caressing his chest, and then whispered in his ear that Daniel should go to sleep now. Words wasted as he noticed that Daniel had drifted into slumber even before his chest stopped heaving. He lay down next to him, breathing hard himself, and despite their mutual stickiness, pulled him in close so he could feel for himself as he slept, Daniel's warm breath against his neck, and hear the constant rhythm of his heart.

Sooner or later he knew Daniel was going to want to see the temple and when he did he was probably going to realize what O'Neill was starting to suspect about why a place with a Stargate was now uninhabited, despite the fish and the fruit and the monkeys in the trees. Until then he thought they should enjoy every minute of every day in each other's company, and smile as they dreamed as they slept.

 

Daniel woke up very early in the morning, before the gulls began calling and when the sea had a pensive sound to its sweep up the beach, as if it was still pondering its dreams. He'd thought the ground had shifted underneath him, a far-off roar, and had imagined himself a deep sea swimmer for a few endless seconds of a nightmare in which he fled from a kraken that spewed tongues of flame. But reality was familiar and safe, especially the steady rhythm of Jack's breathing by his side. There was barely any light, just a pale glimmer to relieve the darkness, and he was still more asleep than awake, but neither his muzzy state nor not being able to see stopped Daniel thinking about giving Jack a blow job. He'd been cheated of that by Jack's unreasonableness, yet his mouth was still eager for that taste on waking. He still hurt a little, a soreness in his thigh, a numbness around his left hip, a deeper ache in his shoulder, but they were minor discomforts. He wasn't dying any more and his temperature was normal. He was also extremely horny and his body was prickling with anticipatory awareness of Jack being nearby, the scent of him in his nostrils, the sound of his breathing in his ears, the sense of his body heat close enough to touch.

Daniel rolled drowsily onto his side and found Jack lying on the pallet next to him. The night had been warm and Jack had thrown the space blanket onto Daniel's side of the pallet, where it was now tangled sweatily around Daniel's bare legs. Jack was buck naked, obviously having removed all his clothes in the night, and smelled faintly of seawater. Even in the faint early morning light, Daniel found he was licking his lips reflexively. He also thought that if Jack was just going to lie there next to him, naked, he should carry his portion of the blame for anything that might…ensue. The man's outline was grainy and monochrome in the darkness, but the bare skin did carry a faint gleam which led the eye from strong shoulders, through the soft fuzz of chest hair, narrow hips arrowing the eye irresistibly to that nestling of loins, a pale shaft just beginning to emerge from a dark curl of hair. He was pleased to see that one part of Jack had half-awoken before the rest of him. He could work with that. Sleepily, Daniel breathed on that appetizing-looking head and then began to suckle.

 

O'Neill woke with a gasp to find his now regular brain-melting dream about being given a blow job by Daniel wasn't fading this time, the sensation lingering, intensifying, the warm mouth around his shaft, skilful tongue exploring the slit of his head, suction, licking, deeper suction, deeper, deeper…

"Oh god…!" The reality on top of the dream was too much, pleasure building, peaking and spurting while he was only barely awake, then lay in the darkness, panting pleasurably. "Tell me I didn't just imagine that."

"Imagine what?" Daniel's lips were pressed to his then a tongue slipped inside his mouth which tasted unmistakably of his salty satisfaction.

O'Neill felt his groin give another twitch in response to that proof that Daniel had just swallowed his semen, just actively encouraged him to come in his mouth. He sucked on his tongue, arousal awakening now. That first response had been physical, blindly reactive, he wanted his mind and full array of erogenous zones engaged in the next bout. He put a hand on Daniel's shoulder, rolling him onto his back and himself on top of him, very comfortable about handling his body after all those days of doctoring. In his dreams, Daniel had always been oddly passive and when he'd tried to make some kind of analysis he'd supposed it was because he either couldn't fill in a response, or because in the only glimpses he'd ever got of Daniel with women or that O'Neill, he'd been pretty much sitting, standing, or lying there while the other person made all the moves. Now he realized his subconscious had actually been doing a pretty smart piece of analysis, because the plain fact was Daniel was more passive than not in bed. Having evidently used up all his initiative for the day in coming up with the idea of a blow job, Daniel let himself be rolled over onto his back and then waited to see what O'Neill was going to do next.

"Doctor Jackson," said O'Neill with mock-sternness. "Did you just molest me in my sleep?"

Daniel looked up at him and nothing could have been more innocent than that face. That was just the way Daniel had looked right after he'd batted his eyelashes at Arris Bock then looked for all the world as if ice cream wouldn't melt in his mouth on a summer day. "No. I would never do that."

"Are you lying?"

Daniel moistened his lips and looked up at the corner of the roof of the shelter as he considered the point. "Yes."

O'Neill stroked a hand down his abdomen, knowing he needed to pee before they got too up close and personal again, but wanting to make sure Daniel stayed focused. "How are you feeling this morning?"

Daniel gave him an under the eyelashes look that would have been utterly groin-hardening had it not made him look about twelve. "A little frisky."

Typical near-escape-from-death-reaction. O'Neill could rationalize it as that anyway. He hadn't been the only one who knew that Daniel was going to die and it was natural that the ex-patient should be feeling a little…celebratory. He was feeling pretty darned celebratory himself, but he was also very aware of how many stitches he had put in and then neatly snipped through again after a suitable ten-day interval.

O'Neill put a hand on Daniel's brow, feeling for fever, then lowered his head to examine for swelling around his wounds, examining his shoulder, then thigh, then hip. And the fact that in the process he had to put his face very close to Daniel's bare skin and that Daniel would then feel his warm breath on his body had nothing to do with what was an entirely professional examination. The way Daniel arched his back as Jack breathed on his groin, making an incoherent needy little gasp as he did so, had no effect on him either. Trying not to grin, O'Neill pretended a close interest in the healed wound on Daniel's thigh, touching the skin gently around the place while he continued to exhale on a now-rapidly hardening cock.

"Jack…please…"

O'Neill looked up at a squirming and erect Daniel in feigned surprise. "Something I can do for you, Daniel?"

Daniel gave him a narrow-eyed look. "Need I remind you there are only two of us on this island, so you either play nice with me or it's just you and your right hand when the sap is rising."

O'Neill breathed on the head of his cock again, grinning wider when he squirmed. "Who are you calling a sap?" Then he turned Daniel's retort into an incoherent moan as he licked the head of his cock, delicately at first, and then hungrily, before taking it into his mouth and starting to suck. He was aware of Daniel making a lot of noise, and grabbed him by the hips, holding him flat to the pallet so he wouldn't move around too much and open up any of his healing wounds. He sucked harder and Daniel bucked under his grip, back arching, hips jolting in his need to thrust. O'Neill tortured him sweetly. Sucking hard then pulling back for some leisurely mouthing of the head of his cock, slipping his tongue into the slit, running his tongue along the length of his shaft, mouthing the firm curve of his balls, pulling the slippery head back into his mouth again and beginning a slow deep sucking motion while his fingers stroked Daniel's perineum. He wasn't trying to bring Daniel off, he knew damned well how to get a guy to come from a blow-job, having been a guy coming from a blow-job many times in his life – although not enough, as it was one of those things, like your team winning, of which there could never be enough. He was just having fun turning Doctor Daniel Jackson of the too-active brain and too many degrees into a squirming mindless jelly. Only when Daniel's incoherence got so loud and so breathless that he seemed in danger of passing out, did O'Neill stop tantalizing him and begin to blow him in earnest. He had to hold him down harder as Daniel lunged underneath him, driven wild by not being able to thrust, but O'Neill sucked him to a slow sweet climax, not letting him rush, wanting him to enjoy every sensation. And was rewarded at last by a strangled sound from Daniel, like his name cried and then abruptly swallowed before completion, just as hot fluid hit the back of his throat. 

Despite his sense of a job well done in getting Daniel to Orgasm City by the scenic route, O'Neill's ears were still burning with the echoes of that half-choked name. Wiping a hand across the back of his mouth, he sat back and gave Daniel a look of enquiry. Still breathing hard, Daniel gave him a look of apology. "I…I meant to tell you before. I never called him 'Jack'."

O'Neill had a sudden recollection of Daniel and the other O'Neill in that corridor, him watching them and listening to them, aggrieved and a little alarmed at his own sense of exclusion, wondering why that asshole from the other dimension wasn't using Daniel's proper name. He blinked in confusion. "You mean you two went on calling each other by those dumb names even after you…?" He shook his head in confusion. "Why?"

"Because you're 'Jack'. I couldn't think of anyone else as 'Jack'. But I was afraid you might think…" 

Daniel grimaced at him and O'Neill thought not for the first time that for a guy who knew twenty-three different languages, Daniel sometimes had a lot of trouble making sense in any of them. He got what he'd just been told though. Daniel hadn't wanted to scream his name to the gods of climax when O'Neill wasn't sure which 'Jack' was being referred to. Which was considerate, certainly, but now he was thinking about the other O'Neill again. 

He rose to his feet. "I need to pee. Wait there." O'Neill pointed an imperious finger at him and strode out into the early dawn, ignoring Daniel's muttered 'Where else would I go?' with the skill of long practice. There were only a few gulls in the distance, scouring the sea for fish, the palms barely rustling as the first traces of pink and gold began to stain the sky. He peed into the sea, trying to dislodge the foam of the sluggish waves that made wet semi-circles on the smooth sand. His own little tribute to Canute.

He realized as he headed back for the cabin that he was too aware of his invisible rival, feeling the need to compete with someone who was effectively himself, unable to stop himself treating this seduction like a military campaign, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition. The other guy had been flirtatious and easy-going, charming Daniel into bed by making it seem to be no big deal, an experiment that might be fun, like smoking a joint or visiting a strip-joint. He didn't feel that way this morning. More like that Alexander guy Daniel was always blathering about, deciding to conquer a new country. He wondered if Janet Fraiser had been lying when she told him that too much testosterone production would erode vital braincells. Carter had nodded in agreement but there had been a smirking look about them that made him suspect they were having a Ya Ya Sisterhood moment. One witch by that cauldron in Scotland would probably just have told Macbeth to have a nice day.

"Jack…"

As he swung himself up the steps into their cabin, he found Daniel standing up with a space blanket knotted awkwardly around his waist. He was doing that fluttery thing with his hands, when he had a lot he wanted to say and the words weren't coming. Daniel bit his lip. "I love you."

"I know you do." O'Neill still wasn't convinced that standing around telling one another soppy stuff was really what he and Daniel should be doing. Of course they loved each other, they had been fighting like a cat and dog for years – with Daniel very definitely in the role of cat – waiting for the world to settle into the right slot whereby they got to this point. A place and a time where they could finally let go of all resistance and sink into sex and togetherness. He still drew the line at big romantic speeches though.

"No, I mean I love _you_." Daniel gave him one of those wincing, slightly embarrassed smiles. "As opposed to anyone else who you might think that I did. Love, I mean. As more than a friend."

O'Neill looked him up at down. Daniel was looking very nice indeed, despite the space blanket from which one long bare leg was visible in a truly enticing way. "Daniel, life's not a chick flick."

Daniel scrunched up his nose in a ridiculously cute way. "Meaning…?"

"There is no scene required where we tell each other lots of girl stuff about how we feel about each other. We just…demonstrate how we feel about each other."

Daniel moistened his lips. "I get you. Like your cutting into your own flesh to try to find a cure to save my life?"

"No." O'Neill waved a dismissive hand. "That's just…subtext."

"And text would be…?" A crease of confusion lined Daniel's forehead while O'Neill waited for him to get it. Daniel looked O'Neill up and down and then began to unknot the space blanket. A slow anticipatory smile spread across Daniel's face and his groin visibly twitched. He was clearly still in that 'didn't die therefore must have sex a lot' post-stress haze. "I think I get you." He let the space blanket fall to the floor.

O'Neill grinned. "I think you do."

 

Daniel had to remind himself that there had been a time when he had unquestioningly thought of himself as heterosexual because right now he spent far too much of his time hungering for the kind of sex he'd never known he even liked until a few months earlier. O'Neill had clearly opened one hell of a Pandora's Box where he was concerned, and much as he loved – and he did love – all the other exciting nighttime – and often daytime – things that he and Jack were getting today together in their beautiful new home, the thing he really wanted was being withheld from him.

For too many days now, their lovemaking had been so gentle he felt like a piece of porcelain in a glass case. Even when Jack's eyes promised the dark, dangerous, and passionate, all his body delivered was proof of the self-control that Air Force colonels had. Gentle kisses and caresses, Daniel being always expertly sucked or fingered to climax, never fucked, even when he was practically begging to be fucked, right here and right now, please, Jack, oh god, _please_ …

Jack's iron self-control didn't suit Daniel's mood, which was reckless with the relief of survival. He wanted them to do it over and over, hot and hard and sweaty and passionate, all caution thrown to the salt sea winds, while Jack had acted as if they'd implode if brought together with too much friction. At times Daniel swore he nearly burst into flames from sheer frustration. He loved Jack's kisses, loved too his skilful use of fingers and tongue to bring Daniel to climax. But he wanted to undermine the cabin foundations with the sheer animal passion of their lust for one another while Jack had him restricted to blow jobs, hand jobs, the gentlest of frottage and intercourse only of the inter crural variety. All enjoyable, certainly, and he'd been surprised to find how arousing it was to feel Jack's slicked member pushed between his tightened thighs, the friction of it between his legs, feeling Jack get harder, hearing him panting, feeling him come.

It was certainly a contrast to O'Neill, who, generally being a little pressed for time, always wanted to plunge his cock into something warm and tight and welcoming as many times as possible before they had to go their separate ways. He liked the weight and taste of this Jack's cock in his mouth, loved it when Jack pinned him gently to the bed and swirled his tongue around the head of Daniel's aching cock then swallowed him to the root. Loved the feel of Jack's callused fingers intimately exploring his body, then curling around his cock to make him come high and hard and loud. But it wasn't the same as being entered, that sensation of burning fullness, the weight and power of a cock thrust into its length, finding that buried gland inside him and releasing those licks of flame. He wondered if it was the memory of the other man penetrating him that was inhibiting Jack from wanting to do the same – except he knew Jack wanted it more than his doppelganger had ever done. He'd been a likeable conquest to the other man but he hadn't made his eyes burn with the desire he read in Jack's gaze. 

He just couldn't see the point in having a six foot two Air Force colonel of his very own if the man could never be persuaded to go a little Black Ops on him in the bedroom. After Daniel had tried to explain some of his frustration, offering to demonstrate with pictures if the man liked, Jack had said in a reluctantly impressed tone, "You're a bit of a slut on the quiet, aren't you, Doctor Jackson?"

Daniel rolled his eyes at the carefully woven ceiling. "I just know what I like."

"Which would be?"

Daniel whispered it in his ear, enunciating each breathed word carefully and had the satisfaction of seeing a cock Jack had insisted was done for the day hardening in immediate response. Jack looked at him in shocked admiration. "I take it back. You're more than a bit of a slut." But still nothing had come of it except another blowjob and how could he complain when Jack had just made him come yet again? When Jack was so considerate and passionate and selfless and skilful? But he wanted their bodies joined. Wanted Jack to want him in a way primal and basic. He wanted to feel the man come inside him, wanted him to lose all self-control.

It didn't seem to matter how many times he breathlessly pointed out that he was healed now, look, all there was left of his injuries was some scar tissue. He could sprint down the damned beach, turn cartwheels, handstands. What would it take to convince him? That was when Jack would just pull him into his arms and kiss him and breathe raggedly, "You nearly died, Daniel. You nearly fucking died." As if that was an answer, and even though it wasn't, it was somehow unanswerable.

 

They had spent many fruitless hours trying to mend the 'gate. They had prodded and poked at it, tried to work out how it had functioned in the first place and every time come to the conclusion that they had neither the tools nor the knowledge to fix it. Still, inevitably, they would go back to it, a puzzle they both knew they couldn't solve yet couldn't quite bring themselves to abandon. Even though it was obvious that the problem lay with some massive shortout in the 'gate itself caused by a power overload, they had tried fiddling with the DHD, moving crystals around and then panicking in case they forgot to put them back in the right order. Jack had tried getting the 'gate to turn manually, but it wasn't a case of just needing to find the juice when there was no juice to be found, the glyphs were blackened and Daniel suspected that even if someone had left a generator somewhere on the island fuelled by rocket grade naqada it wouldn't have helped. This Stargate was definitely not just pining for the fjords, and without the aid of someone who knew what they were doing even a direct lightning strike was not going to make it spin again.

It was impossible to give up though, when the only way home was through the 'gate and the 'gate was right there. It was a magnet for their attention and their energies, sapping their strength, feeding their frustration. When Jack threw a rock at the thing and called it a 'fucking alien piece of shit!' Daniel hadn't even offered any criticism. If he'd had any energy left to throw rocks he would probably have helped him. But that was the point when they had both had to acknowledge that they were probably never going home. They had slept in each other's arms that night, knowing this was it now, they only had each other, and if the other one should be lost, all that would be left to them was loneliness. Daniel still shivered inside when he thought of what that would be like.

Then this morning Jack had told him he had to take a provision-gathering trip, which Daniel wasn't fit enough for yet, and had refused to listen to any assurances that Daniel was more than ready to go anywhere and do anything that didn't involve fish-net-knotting or basket weaving. 

He spent a panicky day on the beach, imagining all kinds of things befalling the man, thinking about what it would be like to try to search for him in the tangle of that jungle, knowing with each failure to find him that Jack might be bleeding or dehydrating to death. It gave him a real taste of what it must have been like for Jack when Daniel had been dying, facing the reality of being left on this place alone. After three hours he was more than ready to concede that absence certainly did make the heart go fonder and he would really like Jack to come back now. He knew he should be grateful to have some time by himself, and perhaps that was the real reason for this day of separation, but he wasn't grateful, he was lonely and nervy and he missed Jack all the time, a marrow deep ache. 

Standing on the golden sand, he heard a far off rumble, and felt the ground shift under his feet a little restlessly, but it was still a shock when a freak wave shot up the beach with the unexpected ferocity of a crocodile and soaked him from head to foot. The simultaneous crack of one of the coconut pines abruptly tearing loose from its shallow roots and falling made him jump in panic. In that moment as he stumbled, unbalanced and dripping wet, the crash of the tree falling sending the ever-present monkeys fleeing shrieking for the dark protection of the jungle, the beach no longer felt safe or like home but just like a place where Jack wasn't. That was when he realized that somewhere over the last few weeks of their exile from everyone else he loved, Jack had become his home, and without him he was lost.

By the time Jack returned, a weary-looking silhouette on the far end of a dusk-darkened beach, Daniel was pretty much a basket case. His "Jack, where the _hell_ have you been?" made the parrots take wing in panic. Jack walked right up to him, gaze fixed unwaveringly on his face, and then as Daniel stood there, heart thumping with relief and indignation and even more relief, Jack put his hands to each side of Daniel's face and pulled him into a kiss that was so deep and so urgent, Daniel led him at once to the cabin without another word spoken. Even though he knew Jack ought to be exhausted, at the look in his eyes he took off his clothes without asking if the man wanted so much as a mouthful of water, yanking at Jack's clothes with the same urgency he could sense thrumming in the man's body. Jack pressed himself against Daniel as if he wanted every part of their skin to touch, kissed him deeper and harder than he ever had before. They landed on the pallet somehow with Daniel underneath and Daniel wrapped his legs around him, imprisoning him, Jack's hips a fleshy hardness bruising the inside of his thighs. He gazed into his eyes as they kissed and kissed but although he could read darkness there, and fear, he couldn't make sense of it. He stroked his chest, fingers soothing but thumbs automatically seeking the nipples that dwelt amongst the soft curls of graying hair. "What is it…?" he breathed. "What's wrong…?"

A tongue filled his mouth, deep and urgent, then was only reluctantly withdrawn to make way for husky speech: "Do you want to have sex?"

Jack's voice sounded ragged with exhaustion, but he kissed Daniel with passionate tenderness. Stubble scraped against Daniel's chin, a sweet abrasion, fingers brushed across his nipples, then a mouth bent to kiss them, to suck, bite softly. "Do you?" The warm breath against the sensitized nubs almost unbearably arousing, such stillness in Jack's body, no patience, the pause of a trigger before it was fired.

"Yes." Daniel felt his heart beating quicker, desire rising in him at once, an unquenchable flame. How long had it smoldered between them, waiting to be ignited, banked down with peat blocks of friendship that kept it quietly smoking? He bent his head to bite at the unshaven fur of Jack's neck, that place that made him shiver with longing when Daniel found it. There. Right there.

Jack moaned and it thrilled Daniel to hear it in his heart, and soul, and groin, that breathless sound of defeat and admittance. In that moment it was as if every Jack O'Neill was given to him, the one who had lost the will to live then found it again on Abydos, the one who had wandered around the SGC with his mind full of Ancient knowledge and such unreadable eyes, every smile and fragment of laughter, the man in the photographs even from before they'd met. He realized Jack had just given himself to him. No more disguise or subterfuge, not more masks worn, lies told, words twisted. It seemed only fair that he should return the compliment. 

He ran his hands through the grizzled hair and kissed Jack hungrily, working his tongue between the thin dry lips, capturing Jack's tongue in his then sucking it into his mouth in encouragement. He reached between Jack's legs and found him already hard but stroked him anyway, slow and tantalizing, using the rough skin of his thumb to make a more pleasurable friction that earned him a deep-throated growl that was by no means a warning. Then he slid down his body on the soft pallet and sucked, drinking in the scent of him, the taste of him, tongue swirling around the eager head, delving between the slit, wanting to summon passion and being rewarded with a salty ooze of precum. Another moan from Jack and his legs were already shaking. Daniel slid soothing hands up the back of his thighs as the man knelt over him, stroking him back to a point of control.

"Now…?" Jack breathed.

"Yes." Daniel lay back on the pallet and reached out with his legs to pull Jack closer. The man needed so little encouragement he practically fell on him, a tongue darting eagerly between his parted lips. Jack's tongue thrust into his mouth hungrily and Daniel sucked on it with equal enthusiasm, he was trying to hook his legs over Jack's shoulders and the man was doing nothing to stop him this time, kissing him hard and deep. 

He felt their stubble collide and realized he hadn't remembered to shave either, Jack's coarser than his, a prickly nap against his soft furring of tentative fair hairs. He thought of Jack shaving him while he slept in the dark shelter, the comfort of that blade scraping gently against his skin, all the intimacies they'd shared in the distant and recent past, but never this, not until now. Tongues intertwined, fingers reached, oil-slicked, the smell of almonds, sunblock, cold, a hiss as it touched, then fingers deft and gentle, so tentative as his body relaxed to meet them, then more confident, urgent, the kiss deeper, a moan from him into Jack's open mouth, something that sounded like another growl from the depths of Jack's chest. Scent of arousal and salt air and the restless sea and the baked-in aroma of skin with the sun on it too long. It was strange not to smell of coffee. Now they both tasted of the sea. Fingers scissored, a gasp from him as he felt himself stretch, that jolt of familiar pain, then Jack's breathing catching in his throat, a hardness touching his thigh, wet on the tip, eager, finally Jack was eager for this. Perhaps he always had been. 

Daniel reached for him, furrowing his fingers in his iron gray hair, pulling his head down, sucking his tongue into his mouth, feeling the lean hardness of Jack's body against his, wanting them to be one, dissolve together, like surf on sand. He broke the kiss reluctantly while his body underwent its own resistance, everything willing but not yet completely relaxed. Jack's breathing quick and harsh in the darkness, the way a stranger breathed, yet smelling only of himself, skin and sweat and the distant memory of gun oil. Daniel bit his neck as the fingers plunged deeper, finding that place Jack liked to feel worried with merciless teeth, while his body gave in at last, let itself be stretched into compliance. Jack's moan so loud above the background music of surf swelling against sand. "Too symbolic," Daniel gasped. "The tide's coming in."

Then he was arching as the head of Jack's cock touched, pressed, pushed, and entered, he was stretched and Jack was shaking with the effort of going slowly. He moaned and let his spine bend the way it wanted to, let his legs clench so there was no possibility of withdrawal, a slow miraculous pain inside him, sweat breaking out on his brow at which Jack bent swiftly to lap, his tongue warm and tender. He moaned again and let the back of his head touch the pallet while his body twisted, he wanted to be suspended in this instant forever, this slow advance, Jack's gradual capitulation to his desires. Then there was hot breath against his lips and he opened his mouth so their tongues could entwine again, while his body sucked Jack in deeper and deeper, both of them moaning into each other's mouths.

The first thrust was agonizingly slow, that long pull back, Jack too slick and him too tight for comfort at first, then a slow push forward which went into some part of him no one else had ever reached – just because it was Jack and he had wanted this for so long. It must have been an unconscious tension underneath the surface of their friendship for years, something that neither of them had never fully noticed or ever dared to look at in the daylight. Confused dreams forgotten as eyelids opened, tangled thoughts in the infirmary when the drip was pumping morphine into an aching vein. Another thrust a fraction faster than the first and he felt his body jolt and gasp with it, unable to decide if this was pain or pleasure, only knowing that it was wanted.

Jack kissed him breathlessly as he shifted his position and Daniel wondered in passing what this was doing to the older man's knees. Their tongues mumbled at one another clumsily as they tried to snatch oxygen as the pace of thrusts increased and Daniel's body relaxed in eager acceptance. Then it was as he remembered it, but better, so much better, at one with one another in a way he and the other Jack had never been. His mind had sometimes wandered then, but not now, nothing could have been more immediate than this and his body was tightening and flexing while Jack thrust with increasing passion, pumping him as he did so, callused hands skilful and considerate. He kept his eyes open this time although Jack's were closed, his forehead creased in concentration, that odd frown on his face he got during sex as if he was listening to far-off music. Daniel kept reaching up to kiss him, nibbling at his mouth while Jack responded blindly, mouth reaching for him while his body kept up its rhythmic thrusting. His arms were shaking with the effort of holding himself upright and Daniel had to admit he did like the fact Jack was the one doing all the work here while he lay back and had lightning bolts of pleasure jolt through him. The bulls-eyes to prostate were coming faster and harder, that starburst of tingling after each one, if the road to orgasm was a musical score each direct hit was taking him up another quaver. Jack groaning as Daniel's body embraced him rhythmically, the ecstatic jolt they both experienced at the end of each thrust. He felt the pleasure build from too many places at once, his breathlessly stroked cock, thighs, testicles, that buried gland inside him and now climbing up his spine. Was this tantric sex or would he need to be chanting for it to count?

The pleasure built unbearably to that place where he could never stay quite long enough and then a last thrust from Jack caused a prostate whiteout and he came loud and hard enough to frighten even the curious monkeys who always crept closer when the humans started to grunt and moan. Then he was like a feather floating from side to side, so gradually drifting back to earth as the aftershocks kept on tingling while Jack thrust harder and deeper, deeper and harder, Daniel's body jolting pleasurably as he came down slowly from his orgasm high. Jack was still stroking him he noticed, even though the man's hand was now wet with his come, brain locked into a place where he was determined not to be selfish however much he lost himself in sensation. Then Jack screwed up his face as if he was in pain and cried out Daniel's name as if he thought he was about to be snatched from him, hot semen gushed inside him and then Jack was lying heavily on his chest, ribs heaving.

Daniel kissed the top of his head and said, "It's okay." Not sure why he was offering reassurance instead of praise yet feeling that was what Jack needed. "It's okay."

Jack pulled out a little clumsily as his body stiffened up, cramped muscles belatedly voicing their displeasure at being so abused, then took Daniel's head in his semen spattered hands and gazed into his eyes. Daniel had no idea what the man was searching for, reassurance that he was still loved, that the sex had been as good for Daniel as it had been for him, or something else entirely. Whatever he was looking for he seemed to find as he kissed Daniel, gently, on the lips and said, "I missed you today. I missed you every minute I was away from you."

Afterwards Jack lay naked in his arms and Daniel found himself stroking his hair as if he was a dog in need of comfort, massaging his scalp, his shoulders, trying to ease the tension from the back of his neck. Jack gazed out of the doorway at the rhythm of the sea and said that he could have died on Abydos that first time, had thought that was what he wanted, for his part in the world to just stop, that he was grateful to have been given a second chance, grateful for the time he'd had since. He spoke in the way men did when they knew they were going to die soon and Daniel had felt his skin prickle with the chill evening breeze. He'd kissed him and said they should sleep now, but hours later when he'd woken again and looked at the man, Jack was still staring at the ocean as if waiting for the answer to a question no one had asked.

***

O'Neill wondered if the lectures might be about to end any time soon. He hadn't actually had a visit from the woman from social services who had arranged Daniel's last fostering, or Daniel's English teacher from seventh grade, but he thought that pretty much everyone else who had ever shown any interest in the safety and welfare of Doctor Daniel Jackson had been in to give him a lecture at some point. Hammond, who was usually an ally, had been pretty withering. For losing Casey he got sympathy, for letting one of his teammates get turned into a Tok'ra – again – he got understanding. For marrying Daniel he had gotten blown up like a stack of ammo.

"You _married_ Doctor Jackson…? Your teammate? Your _civilian_ teammate, who I entrusted to your care only after receiving assurances from you that you would not…"

"It wasn't a scam to get Daniel into bed, sir. I wanted to make a commitment."

"Like the commitment you made on Abydos to your wife?"

"I told her first. We got an annulment. By Ancient Egyptian law it just has to be decided by one or both of the parties… There's no stigma attached. It's not like infidelity…"

"Well, you certainly know all there is to know about infidelity, Colonel…!"

So it had gone on, for what had felt like hours, although commonsense dictated it couldn't have been more than forty minutes at the most. But it had been a comprehensive dressing down from a man who could not more clearly have registered his disapproval and disappointment. Hammond had told him categorically that he had thought better of him than this, had thought that even he would be aware of his responsibilities as an officer and gentleman, not to mention a mentor to Daniel in the strange new world into which O'Neill had brought him. Hammond had agreed to Daniel joining the team on O'Neill's request because he had been told he would be of service to the SGC, and Daniel had more than admirably fulfilled _his_ side of the bargain, however, at no point had Hammond realized that the SGC was now pimping for its officers. The possibility that O'Neill might actually love Daniel and intend to stick to his marriage vows like a limpet in a superglue factory clearly hadn't occurred to Hammond for an instant and no amount of assurances from O'Neill had made any impact. O'Neill had stumbled out of Hammond's office with his self-esteem down around his ankles, wondering if perhaps he had acted like a complete louse as Hammond had just told him, really had taken advantage of someone who trusted him. 

But when he closed his eyes, he remembered him and Daniel lying together in the darkness on the third night of their wedding, the night when permitted by law to consummate their union. The sweetness of their wine-flavored kisses, Daniel's deft fingers, the same fingers he had watched handling broken pottery so ably in the past, proving equally skilful at arousing him to hardness. 

His own intention of some gentle friction as a suitable consummation had been overruled by Daniel's hunger for some warrior initiation ceremony Daniel had read about on a wall somewhere that involved O'Neill imparting his wisdom and strength to him. O'Neill was so head over heels in love, happiness, and brain-fried delirium, not to mention fairly drunk, that he would have done anything Daniel wanted, including painting himself blue and sitting on his head all night, but he seriously doubted he had a lot of wisdom to impart, and given how weak he felt whenever Daniel smiled at him, he suspected his strength wasn't up to much either these days. "What exactly do I have to do…?" he asked warily, wondering if this was going to involve them getting out of their nice warm bed and tramping up some mountains singing native initiation songs. With Daniel you could never tell. 

Daniel gave him a smile that was deliciously naughty and stroked a hand down O'Neill's shaft again while gazing into his eyes. His words were breathed in a low, husky whisper that did extraordinary things to O'Neill's hormones: "You have to put this inside me and keep thrusting until you come. Only when you come am I properly initiated."

O'Neill's throat had gone dry as the sandpaper on the bottom of a birdcage. "Are you sure you read that wall right…? Are you certain this ritual isn't something to do with folk music?"

Another sphinx-like smile from Daniel that made him harden like sun-baked clay. "Didn't you agree to share all your worldly possessions with me?"

O'Neill had to swallow to speak. "I did."

Daniel's fingers tightened around his shaft. "I consider this a worldly possession, so…give."

He gave. Or rather Daniel had given of himself in a sweet sticky night of passionate, tender, and repeated pleasures. No doubt there were evangelists in Georgia who would have called it fornication, but it felt damned close to Paradise to him. Daniel was a little drunk from the special third-night-of-the-wedding-ceremony wine the kindly people of Chulak kept bringing them, any shyness lost somewhere around the second full goblet swallowed in record time. Consequently the enthusiasm and curiosity Daniel usually brought to investigating new cultural customs had been brought to this particular cultural custom with a lack of inhibition that he had found as surprising as it was welcome. 

He'd been very gentle and Daniel had been incredibly sweet, so full of trust for him and so eager that O'Neill had been the one who had to keep slowing things down. He kept his thrusts slow and gentle, making sure he stroked Daniel the whole time, gently encouraging him to relax into the rhythm. He was surprised and excited when he increased the pace to find that Daniel was so responsive, liked it more than he'd ever dared hope for, just the way he'd imagined it with that other Daniel but it had never quite been, Daniel moaning in mindless pleasure which grew more and more intense the harder and deeper O'Neill thrust. They both came together, howling like timber wolves, lean and sweaty and mussed with desire. They wrapped their arms and legs around one another and kissed hungrily, tongues dueling, rubbing their bodies against one another as they tried to keep the nerve-thrilling sensations going for a little longer. That was the point where he had to concede what Daniel had been telling him for a while: that his innocent little archaeologist was neither innocent nor little but was in fact all grown up.

As it was almost impossible to be embarrassed about being naked and sweaty with a man you had just had sex with, they had been completely relaxed with one another after that. After a brief sleep they had awoken sweaty, thirsty and horny. More passing backwards and forwards of the wine cask, a drunken stumble to the Chulakian shower (better than any Earth shower of his experience in having solid gold fittings and permanently hot water, say what you like about the Goa'uld, they really understood good plumbing), a drunken fumble _in_ the shower, before stumbling drunkenly back to the bed. Then they were going to places he had never been with any Daniel Jackson before, including a thorough exploration of the number 69. He and Daniel had been too busy trying to work their way through a mental Kama Sutra to stop and think about how easy they were both finding it to keep getting an erection, so it had taken a few hours before O'Neill realized the Chulakian 'wedding wine' was three parts aphrodisiac. 

After a few breathless hours, they lay on their backs panting, cocks aching from the results of so much pleasurable friction. He looked sideways at a chest-heaving Daniel and said, "It's always the quiet ones."

Daniel snatched a much-needed breath. "Teal'c warned me about men like you."

"What did he say?"

"That he knew well the soul of warriors and ones such as you were sleeping tigers. Once awoken they were always hungry."

O'Neill grimaced. "Does he watch a lot of Kung Fu films or something?" He reached for the wine cask and poured its contents straight into his mouth, but after a brief splash of thirst-quenching wetness, there were only a few drips. "I think we're out of wine." He looked back between them then at the tangle of semen-stained bed linen. "I also think we've just drunk about a quart of the Chulakian equivalent of Spanish fly."

"Well, if we did we're in good company. _Cantharis vesicatoria_ has been used as an aphrodisiac since Roman times. There's an African variety called _vuka-vuka_ which is…"

O'Neill leaned across to kiss him hard, growling in his chest as he did so, torn between annoyance that Daniel could start talking in Latin names at a time like this and relief that he was still so damned Daniel-like even when sweaty, naked, and liberally spattered with semen. "I know. I've used it. Bought some called 'squirrel jump' in a market in Hrare. Like gunpowder to the vital organs."

"Oh." For a moment Daniel looked nonplussed by the idea of someone actually having used an aphrodisiac he'd only read about, then he brightened. "So, you think we've been imbibing some cantharidin derivative for the past few hours?"

"Well, let's examine the evidence, Doctor Jackson. Can you usually get it up every ten minutes for hours at a time?"

"Perhaps we're just naturally athletic?" Daniel suggested. 

O'Neill pushed the empty wine cask with his foot and set it rocking, even finding the soft rhythmic thumping noise of red clay pottery on a rug-covered floor arousing in his present horny state. "I think it's to ensure the bride gets knocked up on the wedding night and they both come away convinced the other one is the best sex they've ever had."

Daniel looked at him sideways. "You are the best sex I've ever had."

"More to the point, you're the best sex _I've_ ever had, and that actually means something."

Daniel gave him a reproachful look. "Are you dissing my sexual experience, Colonel O'Neill?"

"Oh, come on, Daniel. I only have to be better than Betty Wilkins in the tenth grade who let you undo her bra strap and I win that particular prize."

Daniel rolled on top of him, whooshing the air out of him as he landed on his guts, and saying with mock ferocity: "There is no Betty Wilkins in my past, and just because not everyone in this room has been dropping his boxers for anyone who whistles for the past twenty years…"

O'Neill smothered the rest of his complaint with a kiss that was almost a tonsillectomy, rolled them both over so he was on top and found their cocks could duel as well as their tongues and with even more pleasurable results…

Okay, they had both been a little carried away and the next day had been hungover and walking funny, their cocks sore from too much friction, but they'd had a mind-blowingly good wedding night and try as he might to paint himself as the Evil Seducer of the Innocent Victim of his Unnatural Desires, what he remembered was two healthy adult males who were very much in love and having a damned good time.

In the infirmary, Janet Fraiser, who'd never liked him anyway, had treated him like a child molester, Makepeace had said, in front of witnesses, "I knew you were low, O'Neill, but I didn't think even you were that low", and even the guy who got the 'gate to spin had looked down his nose at him in passing. Kawalsky kept smirking about all the noise the two of them had made on their wedding night, and Ferretti was sulking fit to burst. He suspected he only hadn't gotten a lecture from Jacob because Jacob had been too busy bawling out Martouf. In fact Jacob had yelled at Martouf with so much vigor, Hammond had evidently felt he could afford to pat the Tok'ra on the shoulder and tell him that he was sure he had acted for the best. Carter blatantly playing fast and loose with the regs by getting a lot more up close and personal with one of their allies than was permitted by the rulebook had been pretty much overlooked, or possibly blamed on Khenera. Either way no one had said word one to _her_ about her doing Martouf for the whole of one extremely long and sweaty night after someone had delivered some of the Chulakian wedding wine to the wrong room. O'Neill half-wished he was a Tok'ra right now, if only because it would then give him someone else to blame for his decision to have sex with Daniel. It wasn't that he regretted having sex with Daniel, because he didn't, but he would have liked it if someone else could have shared the blame for it.

Daniel himself had pretty much danced into the SGC, eyes shining with happiness, smiling at everyone with blissful sweetness and so dazed with contentment that he'd taken vagueness to a whole new level. O'Neill had sat on the other side of the briefing room watching Daniel drop pencils on the floor, spill coffee, make a total pig's innards of trying to explain to General Hammond what had gone on after he'd been handed over to Teal'c for delivery to Heru'ur, and scatter sheets of barely coherent reports around the room like confetti. He'd known he must have it badly because his response had been to smirk at him dotingly whenever Daniel did something particularly ditzy.

Luckily, Teal'c had accompanied them to the SGC to ensure the strength of their future alliance and had taken in his stride Jacob smacking Martouf around the back of the head for either sleeping with his daughter or making her a Tok'ra, no one was quite sure which, Hammond referring to O'Neill with all the warmth and affection one usually reserved for a plague toxin, and Daniel's sudden inability to string a sentence together whenever O'Neill was in the room. O'Neill thought the real surprise was that Doctor Fraiser hadn't ordered a test to see if they were regressing, because he and Daniel were certainly blushing and stuttering like fourteen year olds, while Carter was sulking about her father's attitude like a teenager about to go out and buy an all-black wardrobe before wearing way too much eyeliner. Teal'c and Bra'tac had been quiet voices of sanity and Hammond had visibly brightened whenever they were the ones whose turn it was to speak. Teal'c had given a matter-of-fact and entirely coherent report of what had happened after his and Daniel's departure from the Chamber of Ra while Daniel nodded, licked the foam from the cappuccino Hammond had arranged for him to have, presumably to get over the hideous trauma of having sex with O'Neill, and said 'Oh yes, I forgot that bit' a lot.

Now, O'Neill was sitting in his office, dismally sorting out a backlog of paperwork and wondering if anyone was ever going to believe that his seducing Daniel wasn't actually a new low in his Bad Old Ways, but evidence of him turning over a New Leaf. Knowing he deserved all the lip curling and head shaking for his past behavior didn't really help as it just made the sting of injustice turn into a dull ache of self-hatred. These were the people who knew him best in the world, and they thought he was an amoral selfish bastard who never thought about anything except where his next fuck was coming from. They also thought he was about as suitable as a romantic partner for Daniel as they thought a wolf would make a good foster father for an orphan lamb. 

He could feel his self-confidence eroding at hitting such a blank wall of criticism. Had they all thought he was a worthless skunk for years for the way he treated his lovers? Had they been bitching about him in the canteen? Taking bets on how long it would be before he got Daniel drunk and charmed him into bed? Were they taking bets now on how long it would be before he was looking around for a new conquest? How could he explain that he had never felt like this before? This wasn't him kidding himself he was going to behave better this time, he never had kidded himself about that in the past, had never gone into a single relationship, including his marriage to Sha're, expecting or intending to stay faithful. But that didn't mean that if the intention had been there he wasn't capable of it. He hadn't cheated on the Daniel from the other dimension. Spiritually and emotionally he might have been falling in love with another person, but he hadn't pursued any other opportunities that had been presented to him within that period and hadn't found those temptations difficult to resist. As the guy was dimension-hopping to be with him, he'd felt the very least he could do was be physically faithful to him, and when he'd realized they were both being emotionally unfaithful to one another in a way too obvious for him to ignore, he'd taken action, ended things, kindly he hoped, although the hurt look in that Daniel's eyes did still haunt him a little. The guy had been important to him. Very important to him. In another world and another time, if there hadn't been the complication of the O'Neill in the other dimension and the Daniel in his, then, yes, he thought they could have made a go of things. But they had been born into different universes and weren't meant to be together. He loved the Daniel in his dimension in a way he had never loved anyone else in his long and checkered life. He wasn't interested in anyone else. Didn't want anyone else. For the first time in his life wanted to get old and crabby and arthritic with the person whose head had been next to his on the pillow this morning. He had never wanted that before. This was different. But there was no way of telling anyone that which would sound convincing. The only way to prove it was to live it, and to never, ever let Daniel down. All the same, it had hurt to discover that he was widely regarded as an immoral shit and he didn't think he was going to get over that any time soon.

 

O'Neill looked up at the knock on his door. He knew it couldn't be Daniel, as he was busy working on a translation SG-3 had brought back and playing with his new cappuccino machine. Given a few squirts of caffeine-flavored foam and some chicken scratchings on a wall even his legally bonded partner forgot he existed. Sighing, O'Neill said dully, "Come in."

At the sight of Hammond in the doorway, his heart sank. Another lecture about his selfishness and irresponsibility was no doubt imminent. Fraiser had already given him a dressing down about not using a condom on Chulak. As the only excuse he could have offered was that there hadn't been enough condoms being carried by both teams to have seen him and Daniel through their third wedding night celebration he'd been forced to sit there in depressed silence while she made his body fluids sound like toxic waste. When he'd feebly mentioned that the only sex he he'd had in the previous six months had been with a Daniel from a different dimension whose blood tests had been as clean as his own, she'd dismissed that as irrelevant. The implication seemed to be that so deep was his moral corruption it had probably turned his semen to sulfuric acid, and whatever its chemical content it should never be allowed to sully the innocent purity that was Daniel.

"Colonel…"

O'Neill nodded dully. "General." He pulled the report a little closer to make it look as if he'd been working on it rather than staring into space. "I haven't quite finished yet, sir."

"Don't worry about that now, Jack." 

The use of his first name made him look up in surprise. He'd assumed Hammond was going to cold-shoulder him forever. The man gave him a look of mingled exasperation and fondness. "I've spoken to Doctor Jackson."

"You have?" O'Neill couldn't keep the wistful note out of his voice. It was only two hours since he'd seen Daniel but it felt like an eternity. He tried to sound a little more like himself. "I suppose he was playing with his artifacts again? I've warned him about doing that in public." 

"He seems to have no perception that your behavior might meet with any criticism."

So they were getting straight back to that then? O'Neill winced. "He's an innocent guy."

"Yes, but neither Bra'tac nor Teal'c fit that description and they both also describe your behavior as 'honorable'."

"It felt that way at the time, sir, but I guess it really wasn't. I should never have let myself fall in love with a teammate. If you want me to resign…"

Hammond interrupted gently, "They told me Doctor Jackson was perfectly willing to sign a very different agreement."

Remembering the wording of the apprentice bonding, O'Neill felt a resurgence of indignation. "That boy has the sense of an egg plant sometimes. It wouldn't have entitled him to anything except a thick ear every time he forgot to call me 'master'. I don't know what he was thinking."

Hammond sat down. "I asked him that myself. His answer was that it didn't matter what wording he signed because he knew you would never hurt him or take advantage of him, or be unfaithful to him."

O'Neill found he was unexpectedly getting choked up. All his emotions still too close to the surface. "Told you he had no more sense than an egg plant."

"Master Bra'tac confirmed that you informed your wife of the change in your feelings. Teal'c told me that Doctor Jackson had told him that he was in love with you and had been for some time before you made your declaration. He declared himself contented with Doctor Jackson's choice of partner and said he had no doubt at all that you would treat him well."

"Did he mention that if I ever _don't_ treat Daniel well he'll pull off my arms and legs and feed my torso to wild dogs?"

For the first time the glimmer of a smile showed on Hammond's face. "I did get that impression. I also got the impression he didn't seem to think such…drastic measures would ever be necessary."

O'Neill met the older man's gaze. "No. They won't."

There was no hiding Hammond's smile now. "Major Kawalsky also tells me that you 'have it bad', and Captain Carter described you as 'pretty much putty in Daniel's hands'. Would you say that was a fair assessment, Colonel?"

O'Neill opened his mouth to make an indignant rebuttal, imagined Daniel in the room with him, passionate about some broken piece of pottery, waving it under his nose and telling him of course they had to investigate this further, didn't he comprehend the full significance of… He sighed. "Pretty fair, yes."

Hammond nodded. "Then I think I may have done you an injustice. And I apologize."

"Have you ever seen the film of A High Wind in Jamaica, General? At the end, the pirates get sentenced to death for a murder the little girl committed. Given the fact they've been murdering people for years and getting away with it, everyone, even the pirate leader, agrees that justice has been done. That's kind of how I feel about being called a selfish bastard for hooking up with Daniel."

"If it's any consolation, I think anyone who called you that in front of Doctor Jackson would get a fairly comprehensive rebuttal."

"Called Jack what?"

They both turned to see Daniel standing in the doorway. O'Neill felt his heart leap in his chest and although he tried to suppress it an embarrassingly goofy smile lit up his face. "Hey, Daniel…" Oh God, he was practically simpering and twirling his hair round his finger right now.

"Hey, Jack…"

Well, that was something. The look on Daniel's face could have lit up the dark side of the moon. Dopey infatuation looked so much cuter on him than it did on O'Neill though. Daniel gave him a smile that made him wonder idly if that was just happiness making his chest feel like that or if he was actually having a heart attack and ought to call for a medic. O'Neill tried to sound casual, "Need some help with a translation?"

"Not right now, Jack." Daniel held up a photograph of something faint and scratchy on a wall. "General, I'm glad I caught you here. I really think we need to investigate this planet, and I don't mean just stick our heads round the 'gate the way we usually do. I think this could be a find of unparalleled significance in…"

"Put it in a report, Doctor Jackson." Hammond hastily rose to his feet. "I'll be sure to give it my full attention."

"Oh." Daniel's mouth formed a perfect circle of surprise that made O'Neill's groin clench painfully. "I could tell you all about it now, if you like? I have slides."

"Let me read the report first." Hammond paused in the doorway and gave O'Neill a gentle nod. "Colonel."

"General." O'Neill felt warmed by his approval, realizing how much he hated being out of favor with Hammond. Then Daniel was sitting on his desk shoving a blurry photo of incomprehensible squiggles under his nose. "Look. Cuneiform. I think this is a lost Babylonian civilization. Isn't that incredible?"

"I don't know," O'Neill admitted. "You're sitting in too close proximity to me and I've now lost all capacity for rational thought. I remember you saying 'Oh' and then everything kind of blurred out on me."

Daniel looked at him sideways, clearly not sure if he was being mocked or not, then a pleased smile slid across his face which he hastily tried to suppress. "You really need to get out more, Jack. Your problem is you spend all day cooped up in an office doing paperwork when you should be having a life."

"You being an expert on having a life, of course?"

"I wasn't the one who passed out at the party on Chulak."

"Yes, you were," O'Neill reminded him. "After two beers."

"I did not!"

"Okay. Three beers."

Hammond gently closed the door and walked down the corridor smiling. If anyone was in danger of needing a life preserver thrown to him in this relationship it seemed to be Colonel O'Neill. He suspected the man's hair was going to be gray by the end of the year, but he had no doubt there would be compensations. Probably many compensations.

***

Daniel woke in the middle of the night, as he often woke these days, from a nightmare of the ground moving to the taste of Jack kissing him. The kisses were sweet but insistent, coaxing him into wakefulness in a way that couldn't be denied. 

Jack had been less talkative since that night when he'd finally given Daniel the sex he'd been waiting for, a look in his eyes Daniel didn't entirely understand, and any tentative requests for information were met with 'When you're better…' or 'You need to see this for yourself', but every night since then there had been the three a.m. fuck. The darkest hour before dawn waking from sweet kisses that turned into the kind of sex he'd only ever dreamed about, like free-falling without a safety net, sky diving without a parachute, sex as a dangerous sport in which if you hadn't pulled a muscle by the time the sun came up, you just weren't trying.

Now teeth tugged at his lower lip, then lips were pressed against his, coaxing and urging, a tongue asked for admittance as he fumbled towards full consciousness. The smell of Jack's sweat in his nostrils was immediately familiar and arousing. Outside he could hear the palm leaves rubbing against one another in the wind, the constant murmur of the sea. He felt Jack's stubble against his chin, a pleasurable friction, a hot tongue delving deeper, hungrier now. The same urgency he'd noticed last night and the night before. Just a reaction to them almost losing one another for good, he supposed, but it didn't seem to be getting any better with each passing day. Daniel stroked his hands down Jack's muscled torso, trying to soothe him, but Jack clasped his head in his hands to kiss him harder, making Daniel's chances of analyzing his motivation recede from unlikely to impossible. One place where he had no concerns about letting Jack take charge was in the bedroom, if the guy wanted to swing from the non-existent light-fittings or experiment with any position he liked, Daniel was okay about it. This definitely constituted one of the areas where they shared total trust. 

All the same, Jack's urgency of late could be a little breath-stealing. Not just the way his kisses plunged in so deep and so hard, but the way he seemed ready for action at the flutter of a space blanket, the sniff of a response from Daniel and Jack was hard in a moment. 

Daniel had to pull away to snatch some air, their tongues reluctant to part company, Jack's stubble grazing against his cheek. Jack was breathing quickly, warm breath tantalizing Daniel's ear. Daniel was still trying to restock on oxygen when Jack was sucking at his neck, body pushing up against Daniel in invitation and encouragement, hard cock calling to still soft cock, warm skin rubbed against his. Daniel felt his body responding at once to Jack's arousal, gasping as the suck turned to a bite that jangled straight through his nerve-endings, a callused hand moving between his legs, curled fingers dragged up his shaft, stroking him to hardness. Jack kissed him hard on the mouth, tongue plunging in deep, stealing his breath again, and then teeth fastened on his pulse point in earnest, making his back arch, making him moan. That was his hot button, that knife-edge between pain and pleasure. That was what turned him to a sweaty, shuddering puddle of brain-fried lust. He'd never got there before, because he'd never trusted anyone enough to let this happen. With the other Jack he'd had very enjoyable sex but they had always been aware of the briefness of their acquaintance and it had inhibited the taking of liberties. With Jack there was no such problem.

He rolled over onto his hands and knees, partly because it drove Jack crazy when he assumed that particular position, and also because he still had friction burns on his back from their lovemaking of the night before. It was surprising how abrasive woven grass material could be against the skin even through the thin protection of a space blanket. The friction burns on his knees were pretty much healed now, Jack had licked them to soothe away the sting, kissing them better in a way that had pretty much blown his mind. 

Now Jack wrapped himself around him, the fuzz of his chest a soft warmth against Daniel's tender back, and began to nuzzle at his neck and ear. His breath was hot and it made Daniel shiver with longing. Jack nipped at his ear, then began to whisper how much he needed this, what it did to him when Daniel wanted this as much as he did, how incredible it was that they'd found one another… The sentences were disjointed, the words confused, but the meaning was clear enough. They'd made love only a few hours ago, just before they went to sleep, so there was no need for preparation, but it still felt sexier when they did it like this, reckless and wild, no fumbling for lubricants, either the natural ones they were experimenting with or the last dregs of sunblock squeezed from their equipment, just this spontaneous, passionate, joining of bodies. Jack was still whispering hotly in his ear as he entered Daniel with one urgent flex of the hips. Daniel gasped as he was stretched, a shiver of pain through his body as he was filled so completely, sweat trickling down his face, bending his head so Jack could love-bite the back of his neck. Jack was already thrusting and Daniel's body jolted to the rhythm of it, excited by the urgency but confused by it as well. It was difficult to think coherently when lightning bolts of pleasure were thrumming through one's prostate, but Jack was acting as if every time could be the last time, the need in him evident in every groan of desire, every jerk of his hips, the way he kissed and nibbled at Daniel's ears and neck, words panting from him in between groans, growls and moans of desire:

"…you do know it's not the thought of… never having sex again… it's the thought of never making love to _you_ again… so much wasted time… days and weeks and months and years… what was I thinking, Daniel…? What was I thinking…?"

Even if Daniel could have thought of a response, speech was impossible. He was breathless from Jack's thrusts, and the blood his brain urgently needed was now all settled into his aching erection. An erection Jack would torture him by not touching when they were in this kind of frenzied mode because after fucking Daniel through the mattress he then wanted to fall on his cock and suck it to climax like he hadn't eaten for a week.

Jack was biting his shoulder, then putting all his weight on one arm to use his left hand to card fingers through Daniel's hair, pulling his head back, mouthing his neck, kissing his lips. Daniel panting dazedly into his open mouth, trying to lock tongues the way Jack wanted but too in need of oxygen while his body was shoved inexorably towards the woven cabin wall from the force of Jack's thrusts. Jack kissed him hungrily, sucking on Daniel's tongue, then thrusting his own into Daniel's mouth, a hand to the back of his head to keep the kisses deep, and all the while hips moving urgently, breathless and sweating with the energy he was exerting to drive his cock fast and hard into Daniel over and over again.

"Jack…please… touch me…"

"Not yet…"

They were slick with sweat, the back of his thighs and the front of Jack's legs slippery with it, Jack's chest hair wet with it, Daniel's back oiled with it. It was unsustainable, this pace, this level of passion. Daniel was breathless from being pounded by Jack's increasingly frenzied thrusts, held on the brink of orgasm, rocking on it like a feather balanced on an upturned sliver of glass. Each jolt of Jack's cock inside him was like a current from his prostate to every other erogenous zone in his body, he felt as if his veins were crackling with pure electricity. Jack's grunts as he thrust were coming so close together it had turned into one incoherent animal sound, Daniel was moaning, a low needy plea for something he couldn't have identified, Jack to stop, Jack to never stop, Jack to touch him, not touch him so he'd stay just like this with the climax almost on him but not quite spinning him under its final wave. It was like being at the vortex of a hurricane, sensations swirling all around him in a flurry of Jack's groans, grunts, and thrusts. His knees were being ground into the pallet again, his arms shaking with the effort of holding himself up against the onslaught of Jack's overwhelming need. Every cell in his body was screaming with brain-fried lust, his cock aching for release.

"God… Daniel… Stay…!"

Jack came with a last thrust then collapsed on top of him, hips still jerking as he wrapped his arms around him, Daniel automatically tightening around his cock as it spurted semen in burst after burst, a jet of hot fluid making Daniel moan with pleasure. Jack pulled them over sideways, panting into Daniel's ear, then craning his neck to find his mouth. They were both too breathless for kisses but Jack kissed him anyway, snatching a breath then pressing his lips against Daniel's, trying to suck on his tongue.

"Jack…?" Daniel twisted round to look at him, concerned despite his mind-blurring desire. It was as if nothing got Jack to where he needed to be any more, however hard and often they tried, they always seemed to fall short. Jack was stroking Daniel's short hair back from his face, kissing him again as he snatched a few more mouthfuls of oxygen, over and over, mouth tender against his, lips so sensitive, tongue needing to wrap itself around Daniel's.

"What's wrong?" Daniel breathed.

"Nothing."

Daniel winced a little as the spent shaft slipped out of him. He was sore, too much of a good thing. His erection was still aching though and he gasped as Jack grasped it and began to fondle it, thumb playing with the tip before fingers cupped it and began to slide up and down. Then felt Jack's soft cock slip between the crack of his buttocks, slowly rubbed up and down between them, smearing spilled come down between his buttocks, across his perineum. He liked that a lot, just as he liked it hard and passionate, and slow and tender, and fast and sexy, and leisurely and loving, liked Jack to whisper in his ear, kiss him just like this, liked to be woken with caresses, liked every single thing Jack had been doing to his body and his erogenous zones for the past few weeks… But sometimes when you were being fed caviar and champagne every day you started hungering for a little beefsteak and beer, or even dry bread and water, overdosed on pleasure even orphans could start to hunger for a little honest neglect. 

Daniel spoke rapidly before the stroking of his shaft turned him to a mindless jelly. "Is it the other Jack? Are you trying to prove you're better? Because if so, trust me, you're better."

Jack kissed him again then breathed in his ear: "I'm trying to make up for lost time I can never get back. I'm trying to prove that we're alive. I'm trying not to think about anything except this minute, this second, just…now and nothing else. No past and no future, just the present." With each panted few words he was rubbing his hand up and down Daniel's shaft, but although it was enough for Daniel it clearly wasn't enough for Jack. He pulled away abruptly, catching hold of Daniel's thighs, pulling him down the pallet and closing his mouth over Daniel's erection, sucking hard.

Daniel bucked, back arching, unable to recapture the balance he'd been clawing for. He had questions he needed to ask, thoughts he needed to think, but… hot wet suction on his aching cock, deeper, harder, so warm, tongue in his slit, underneath, teeth grating across the head… sucking, so deep, so fucking deep… ohgod ohgod ohgod… whiteness… blackness… silence…

"Daniel…?"

He woke with a jolt to find his face being lightly slapped.

"Danny…!"

"Ow! Jack, cut it out." He waved a hand ineffectually in the man's general direction. "I was dreaming about us doing really good stuff."

"You passed out!"

"We were under a waterfall."

Jack stared at him in disbelief. "Daniel, you were unconscious for two seconds. At the most."

Daniel raised his eyebrows at him. "So, why were you panicking then?"

Jack looked a little embarrassed. "I thought I'd kind of…killed you."

"Hell of a way to go. And it would look good on my tombstone: 'Died of a surfeit of pleasure'. Much better than lampreys."

Jack gave his head a shake as if trying to get water out of his ears. "I don't know what lampreys are and I don't want to."

Daniel moistened his lips. "Are you going to tell me what's up now? You know, as for once neither of us is? And for future reference, they're a kind of fish and King Henry the First – son of William the Conqueror – was supposed to have died from eating too many of them."

Jack stared at him blankly for a moment. "I really want some fish now. I can't back go to sleep until I've eaten. That's your fault. You and your damned history lessons."

It was the most normal Jack had sounded in days and Daniel grinned with the relief. "You don't think you making like a bunny on Dexedrine has anything to do with giving you that appetite?"

"Nah." Jack wrinkled his nose. "That would never do it. Do you want fish…?"

 

They ate their grilled fish on the beach to a backdrop of the ocean rolling in, their hair dampened with spray, the campfire roaring, spitting sparks into the darkness. The fish was too hot and oozed oil which crackled blue-green when it fell into the flames. They ate it from pointed sticks, even though they still had cutlery left, just because they were castaways on an island and pointed sticks felt de rigueur. Daniel hadn't bothered to dress, just wrapping the space blanket around himself, but Jack had pulled on his pants, his chest hair still shiny with sweat, the droplets turned to bronze by the firelight. Daniel knew there would be two fires reflected on his spectacles but he hoped Jack could also see his eyes. It felt as if that was important given that they really needed to talk. He'd thought Jack would take some coaxing, but the man started speaking without needing any prompting in the end, shrugging as he did so, like someone laying down a burden he'd carried for far too long.

"If you climb to the top of this cliff…" He pointed with his stick, the skewered fish-flesh adding emphasis to the direction. "You can see the sea."

"I can see the sea from here." Daniel licked fish oil from his fingers, thinking idly that however good this meal might be for Jack's arthritis he doubted it was going to make up for the damage the man must have just done to his knees. "It's the big wet thing right in front of us."

Jack gave him a level look and continued evenly: "We're in a bay, the rocks out there break up the waves. By the time they reach us they're pretty much tamed, but beyond the bay it's a rough sea. And there are sharks. Lots of them. I think they're following the tuna. I saw shoals jumping. Their fins shone in the sunlight. It was really something." He smiled then, but it was a sad smile. "So we can build a raft and we can give it a shot if you want to. I'd rather do that than just wait here."

Daniel felt the kind of chill travel through him that no external heat could touch. Not even a roaring campfire of palm tree branches spitting sparks into the darkness a few feet from where he sat. "Wait here for what?"

"This isn't an island, it's a volcano. And it's building up to erupt."

Jack looked peaceful after he said it aloud. As he let the fish slide from his stick almost unnoticed, only vaguely aware of it even when its hot scales landed on his bare foot, Daniel noticed that there was a kind of acceptance about the man that hadn't been there before. Perhaps he'd finally given in to the reality he'd been denying for the past few weeks.

Daniel said idiotically, "But it's so beautiful."

Jack gave him a smile of tender regret. "You're a lot better at the mythology stuff than I am, but I think that's what it says on the temple. That it's too beautiful here for mankind. Because we always screw up somehow and get cast out. There's a tree you're not supposed to take the fruit from. One with a snake around it. If you do apparently the volcano erupts. I didn't really get the fine print to be honest, but there were pictures of a guy taking fruit from a tree and then pictures of a volcano blowing its stack and them running for the 'gate."

They turned and looked at the 'gate together, as if it should somehow have miraculously healed itself, just because it was now so urgently needed.

"Another Eden variant." Daniel dragged his gaze from the useless 'gate and looked around at the beach, the rustling and fluttering of the palm leaves in the darkness. "It doesn't feel like a place about to blow up."

"No, on the outer rim it's fine. But in the center it's starting to heat up. A few days ago when I went to the temple the lake there was bubbling. I smelled sulfur, and the birds are leaving." He shrugged. "We could have years. These things sometimes have a lot of false alarms. Look at Yellowstone. But… I did take fruit from the tree with the snake on it."

"It will be symbolic," Daniel said automatically. "Not one fruit or one tree, just a warning about sustainable resources, not eating more than can be renewed. Not cutting down every tree when you're a fishing culture or you won't be able to make boats. Like Easter Island." He looked along the beach, the sand looking white in the darkness, the rush of foam as it flowed onto the beach shining in the starlight. "What about the monkeys? If it erupts on a regular basis and there isn't another island within swimming distance, how can there be monkeys?"

"I wondered about that too. Maybe there are parts of the island the lava doesn't reach. The wildlife takes cover there until the lava cools. The plants cover it eventually, put down new undergrowth. In a few hundred years the volcano is covered in trees again."

"So there's a hope we could stay here?"

Jack grimaced. "Daniel, when Mount St Helens went up there were people who'd gone to photograph it who couldn't outrun it, and they had cars and the scientists' reports to give them a head start. There's no way of telling which way this thing is going to blow, not when or in which direction. Some of the monkeys survive because they aren't in the bit that gets covered in molten lava but I bet a lot of them die."

Daniel winced as he realized he'd just scalded his foot and not even noticed in his bodily numbness. "Animals are supposed to have an instinct for these things. We could follow the troupe who live by the beach when they start to head away."

"What if they don't? What if they sit there with no idea it's going to happen until it does? What if we follow them and they're wrong?"

Daniel looked back at the sea, imagining the waves against the breakers, the slow circle of dorsal fins leaving an arrow-shaped ripple in the waters, a triangle of blackness against a grainier darkness when the moon went behind a cloud. "I'm not a good sailor. I read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner too young."

"We're not going to kill any albatrosses." Jack forced a smile that wouldn't have convinced a five year old. "And I do have a gun. Put a bullet in a shark and the other sharks will eat it instead of us."

"What if there's nothing out there except ocean?"

"There must be land somewhere."

"Why must there?"

Daniel looked down the beach, feeling his skin all goose bumps from the night breeze despite the campfire. The sea was still rolling in relentlessly, unmoved by the prospect of eruption. Last time it must have blown the other way, the side of the island neither of them had reached yet, there were no geological signs of a lava flow here. Perhaps it would do the same next time. Or perhaps it was now their turn. Death by fire or water. He'd been caught between those possibilities before, the water of reality, the fire in Jack's false memory. Abandoned on the ocean floor, prisoner of an alien, because of bubbles and flames and a belief that he was already dead.

He wriggled his seared foot out from underneath the cooling lump of fish. "Let's go to bed."

As they went back into the cabin, the smell of semen filled his nostrils and with it the scent of Jack's urgency, his fear of losing everything that mattered to him just as he'd found it again. "Whatever happens we'll be together." Daniel found a smile with difficulty, still feeling chilled to the marrow, imagining the heat of the lava burning through their skin, seeing Jack charred to a skeleton in front of him. Or the two of them parched and salt-blistered by the relentless beat of the sky and sea and surrounded by water they could never drink. Gazing at one another wretchedly across the sun-seared deck of some disintegrating raft, tongues swelling, skin peeling, wondering which of them was going to be left alone when the first of them died. 

This time when they clung to one another in the bed, it was for warmth and comfort, Daniel rubbing his face against the soft fuzz of Jack's chest hair, breathing in the man's scent as if it were a garland of lilies. Jack put his arms around him and held him close, kissing the top of his head and saying his name softly, like an incantation to ward off evil, while the ocean washed up to their campfire and turned its burning timbers to defeated coils of smoke.

***

General George Hammond read his way through the last report for the third time. Or was it the fourth time? If there were clues in it, he couldn't find them. He had never been someone who looked for patterns in the cosmos until he'd found himself reading a note written to his present self by a future version. He'd had an unfair advantage over O'Neill from the outset, knowing he must be lying about Jackson because twenty-eight years before he had seen Jackson in O'Neill's company, large as life and twice as natural, so the man couldn't have died on Abydos the way O'Neill had reported. Then there had been his knowledge that Teal'c was downright destined to be on SG-1. That hadn't been something he could share with Washington when they were pressing for Teal'c to be treated as a hostile alien and the only information he could give them in the Jaffa's defense were his recent actions and O'Neill's absolute conviction that the man was trustworthy. He and O'Neill had held several conferences in his office in the small hours when there was no one else around, O'Neill thinking that what he was doing was trying to talk Hammond into letting Teal'c and Doctor Jackson join SG-1, when what was really happening was Hammond having O'Neill help him rehearse the reasons he was going to be giving to the Pentagon to explain his determination to do just that. But he'd always felt the timeline he'd glimpsed was a fragile thing, a thin skin around the present, all-too-easily torn. When he'd thought Jackson was lost on P3Y-549 it had felt as if not only SG-1's present had been ripped apart, but their anchor to the future as well. Now everything could never be the way it was supposed to, a new beginning but all it had felt like was an ending. 

He remembered the way O'Neill had been with Doctor Jackson after they'd got him back from the dead, so gentle with him on-world, apparently snappy with him off-world as an owner whose dog had recently run off and got hit by a car. Daniel had never taken well to being given orders, Hammond had no doubt there had been an element of sulking involved in his straying into that other universe on the first occasion it had happened, and an element of O'Neill's over-protectiveness making him brusque also. After that, O'Neill had tended to put up with anything Doctor Jackson did with a resigned shrug, he knew what losing him felt like and it hurt unbearably, compared with that anything was tolerable. 

Although he knew very well what motive most people had assumed for the way O'Neill had become with Jackson after his appendix scare, he'd liked to think it was a fear of losing him that had made him become so bad-tempered and dismissive of him. He wasn't blind to the possibility that there might be some desire there also, O'Neill's behavior whenever Jackson became embroiled with yet another alien female had always appeared worryingly close to jealousy. But he had hoped that by signing Jackson off onto missions with other teams he would have given O'Neill the wake-up call he needed that he was much happier to have him close at hand, without anyone needing to get too Freudian. The other O'Neill, of course, had completely ruined hopes of that. If O'Neill and Doctor Jackson's relationship had already been combustible, the other O'Neill had added gasoline and a match. After that, it had been a little difficult to regard O'Neill's jealousy as something inert or repressed. He hoped those trips to Mackenzie had done some good but with O'Neill it was often hard to tell. He had certainly never yet been able to get through any mention of those events or of his other universe counterpart by referring to the man by his real name. Hammond had been forced to go through one entire mission report changing the name 'Jerk Off O'Neill' to 'Jack O'Neill' thinking grimly at the time that the title was sometimes all-too appropriate…

He closed his eyes as he told himself for the hundredth time that they were really gone this time. Maddening O'Neill, the irascible and occasionally insubordinate hero he would have been proud to call a son, and Doctor Jackson, a man who seemed to have a limpet-like ability to attach himself unknowingly to the affections of others. He wondered now that he had ever been tough enough to raise his voice to someone so inherently special. He didn't think he was getting soft in his old age, it was just impossible to deliberately put hurt into those expressive blue eyes, just as it was impossible to tell off someone like Major Carter, who worked so hard at being good, still trying to please a father who unbeknown to her had been so proud of her his whole life that he had never been able to get through a diplomatic gathering when she was growing up without telling everyone her school marks. Both the Carters could shout at one another with impunity by this point in their relationship, but he'd noticed even Jacob couldn't bring himself to raise his voice to Doctor Jackson. He wasn't averse to punishing O'Neill obliquely either if he thought he was failing to treat the younger man with proper respect. If O'Neill and Doctor Jackson had been in a relationship there was no doubt about who would have been sided with by every authority figure who knew them both, and it wouldn't have been the military man in the equation. If they'd been in a relationship…

It had been like losing two of his children. And, as with lost children, if he could get them back he was ready to forgive anything, turn a blind eye to anything. He just wanted to know they were alive, and knowing they were alive, find a way to get them home.

He hadn't been able to confide in anyone else that he still had hope. Major Carter was too ready to start number crunching at a moment's notice. Unable to believe that the answer didn't lie in her equations somewhere. Pure science had always been her friend before, but now it had abandoned her, the numbers multiplying and dividing into infinity without suggesting a single sum that could lead to the location of her friends. But he didn't think logic was going to help them this time. They needed Daniel to throw something in from left field, but none of them thought the same way he did, and he wasn't around to save himself. Sighing, Hammond turned back to the reports. He knew he must be getting desperate when he was combing through files of events that had taken place in different dimensions, but that was what he was doing all the same. Perhaps there was no help in finding their missing people in this dimension, but there might be a clue in another universe through one of these quantum mirrors Daniel Jackson had visited to meet with that other O'Neill…

***

Daniel ran his fingers curiously across the carvings on the stone wall, they'd faded with age and time but were still clear enough. It was odd to be shown around an ancient temple by Jack. To see the creepers hacked through that Jack had cleared so he could look at these wall carvings. Most of the structure was still swallowed by the jungle but these chambers were accessible now and he was squandering their flashlight batteries to examine what was depicted here.

"Do you agree?" Jack's hot breath against his ear distracted him, making his mind move lustwards. Unfortunately the prospect of imminent death was there right in front of him to take his mind back to the grim present.

Daniel sighed. "Yes." The whole wall had been carved and then painted once, but much of the paint had worn away, leaving only a few splashes of pigment here and there. The red flow from the volcano, a green smudge of color still remaining on the snake, a flicker of yellow tongue. There was still a hint of blue in the place where the event horizon should shimmer. A few of the departing people had a few specks of flesh tone left on their faces. One teardrop on an anguished face survived as a brown-skinned man carrying his child looked back at the volcano. They too had not wanted to be driven out of Paradise, and they had also been given time to record their imminent departure before they set out for the unknown. They'd left the 'gate address they'd taken, for people like him and Jack he presumed, an intergalactic forwarding address. Letting the ones who came later know that the volcano erupted and why and where they'd gone to escape the wrath of their angry god. He wondered what it was in the human race that made them blame themselves for things that were not their fault, conjuring up gods to deal out immortal punishment for what were entirely natural disasters, and yet also claimed the approval of the gods to support all manner of genocide and brutality. A species permanently tilting on the scales of mercy and cruelty, self-hatred and self-aggrandizement, curiosity and ignorance.

He could hear the birds calling in the trees, the monkeys shrieking to one another. They sounded agitated now, whereas they had sounded peaceful before. Did they know or was he just projecting his own fear onto them? On their way here there had been clear evidence of volcanic activity, not just the smoke now visible from the distant mountain, but the bubbling of water in the forest pools, the dead fish floating on the surface.

"Do you know where they came from?" Jack was looking not at the wall paintings but at his face. Daniel was aware of his gaze, Jack trying to memorize the way he looked, apparently convinced that everything ended with dead or that they would be separated in whatever afterlife he believed in. He remembered Jack talking about hell before they had gone to Netu as if it was somewhere he expected to end up, not flippant, although it had seemed a throwaway remark, as if some part of him believed it. Perhaps he was still enough of a Catholic at heart to believe Daniel would ascend to heaven while he would be condemned to hell. Perhaps people ended up where they thought they deserved to be. If so then Daniel was going to find a way to the underworld and bring him out of there. He wasn't going to memorize every line on Jack's face, the way his bristles looked against his skin, the scar through his left eyebrow, the shape of his nose, his mouth, his eyes… They were burned into his mind already and would never fade, and anyway, he was determined that alive or dead they were going to be together somehow.

He kept his voice as calm as possible. "I think it's a variant of the Polynesian Mahui-ike legends. She wasn't really a goddess, more of an ancestor-heroine. She lived in the underworld and could make fire. Maybe the Goa'uld brought people from different parts of Oceanic culture because there seems to be a mixture of Polynesian and Maori mythology at work here. There's something about a marriage between Tane and Mahui-ike producing a child that is part forest and part fire called Tanui-ike." His fingers traced the carvings carefully, feeling the words. "He was so large that people thought he was an island and came to live upon him, but he was alive and his soul was in the fruits of the snake-tree. His father, the forest god, told the people that they could cut down the trees to make fuel or to make boats but they must never take more than could be reborn again or his son would be weakened and begin to die. His mother said that the veins of her son ran with fire and that if he became angry he would bleed flame upon the land. To prevent incurring his anger they must treat all of the natural world with respect and they must never eat of the fruit of the snake-tree or his rage would destroy them all…" He sighed. "The rest is missing, but I guess someone ate the fruit of the snake-tree."

"I ate the fruit of the snake-tree," Jack admitted. "When I was trying to find a cure for you."

"Jack, the volcano isn't erupting because you ate some fruit. If Sam was here she could tell you there is no possible correlation between those two events and that a geophysical event like a volcanic eruption could never be triggered by the removal of a couple of apples from a tree."

Jack kept on looking at him. "If you were here you could tell me that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, unfortunately you're not really here because I'm holding your hormones captive and whenever you look at me you glaze over into slack-jawed lust…"

Daniel rolled his eyes. "Look, anthropologists may be inclined to believe six impossible things before breakfast but even we don't believe in volcanoes that erupt out of anger because of snake-trees losing a few fruit. And my lust is perfectly under control, thank you, and not affecting my judgment in any way."

"Is that so?" Jack leaned in really close so Daniel could feel his breath against his mouth. "Not affecting it in any way?"

Daniel swallowed hard. "Not at all."

When Jack kissed him he couldn't stop his eyes closing, his bones melting, that whimper escaping from his lips. His hands were reaching for Jack's belt buckle before he could stop himself, hormones jangling helplessly at being in close proximity to Jack's tanned muscular body. Jack was no better, his tongue curling around Daniel's, his stubble rough against Daniel's chin. His fingers were inside Daniel's shorts at once and Daniel felt himself hardening traitorously on immediate contact with those familiar callused hands. Jack had one hand behind his head, pulling Daniel deeper into the kiss, the other encouraging his cock. Daniel kissed him back, fierce and hungry, still seeing those fleeing people in his mind's eye, the volcano preparing to erupt, the mud of the drying pools bubbling from the subterranean fires…

Jack was pumping his cock now, his free hand encouraging him to kiss him deeper, which Daniel did, sucking on Jack's tongue, closing his eyes to concentrate on the sensations of Jack's mouth against his, their tongues intertwining, his fingers in the softness of Jack's grizzled hair, the rasp of Jack's unshaven jaw lightly abrading his skin, and the building pleasure of Jack giving him a hand job with sure deft strokes of his fingers and palm against the sensitive slippery skin of Daniel's cock. Jack's hand tightened in his hair, pulling him in deeper, deeper, while fingers stroked, then began to pull in quick hard strokes along his erection. He sucked harder on Jack's tongue as the pleasure built, feeling his face contort, spine stiffen, the orgasm building from the base of his spine, up through his balls to – 

"Yes…!"

He gasped it in triumph as his back arched and he shot his load into Jack's hand. At once Jack pulled him back in for another fierce kiss, the urgency of those in mortal peril in every flex of his eager tongue, every tender pressure of his warm lips.

Still panting from his recent climax, Daniel pulled away from Jack's kiss to nuzzle at his neck, feeling stubble brush against his mouth, nipping his shoulder then kissing a trail down his chest, through the curls of graying hair there, closing his teeth on one nipple which hardened at once under his touch while his fingers tugged at Jack's belt buckle and then buttons before his fingers were cupping his testicles, feeling the weight of them in his palm. He mouthed the other nipple to equal hardness before dropping a series of love bites down Jack's chest and ribs. Jack was still stroking his limp cock, milking the last drip of pleasure from it, but as Daniel slid down lower, Jack had to let him go. Daniel heard his breath catch in his chest, his cock bobbing higher in anticipation. 

Daniel murmured, "You could put someone's eye out with that thing."

Then Daniel was on his knees, mouth chasing a cock that was slippery with eagerness. Captured in the heat of his mouth it swelled, oozing salty precum which he licked from the tip. He ran his tongue along the base and felt Jack tense against the wall, needing to have the world blotted out for him, everything receding except the sensation of Daniel's hot eager mouth around his straining cock. Daniel sucked him hard, trying to make his throat relax to take him all the way in. The head felt heavy in his mouth, large and salty, the shaft wide and slippery, but he hungered for it, mouth and tongue feasting on it, sucking and licking, trying to drive Jack insane with pleasure, tongue darting eagerly from head to slit to gland, flickering over the underside, lapping at the slippery sides. Jack was moaning and despite his recent climax Daniel was feeling aroused all over again, turned on by the way he had Jack so helpless, hands braced and open against the stone walls as the man held himself up, pants down around his ankles, emitting gasps of pleasure at every suck. He hungered for Jack's cock, reveling in its length and thickness, but as he took it in deeper than he ever had before he thought about Jack fucking him, this same slippery eager erection entering his body, being thrust up into him, spurting semen deep inside him. He could feel his bare ass aching with need, open, eager, just at the thought of it, every cell in his body clearly focused on the next touch from Jack O'Neill. He jerked his head back just in time, letting the hot head slip from his mouth, and Jack cried out in frustration.

"God…Daniel… Please…!"

Daniel pulled himself up until they were on eye level, letting Jack see the passion and need in his eyes, reading the frustrated desire in brown eyes that were now almost black with wanting. Voice ragged with lust he said, "Fuck me, now, hard. Do it."

Then he was bending over a low wall, gripping the creepers that sprawled over the stonework in an arc no more graceful than his own, blinking at the tongue flicker of a bright green lizard that eyeballed him in suspicion as he straddled his legs.

For once, Jack didn't argue with him. Too brain fried with lust to think about anything except getting off somehow. He felt warm hands on his ass, parting his cheeks, a finger wet with spit or precum smeared around the entrance. He braced himself, wrapping his hands in the fibrous creepers, and then the cock was driven into him in a deep sure stroke. He cried out because it hurt so fucking much and felt so fucking good, exactly what his ass had been aching for, fearing it was going to miss out. "Harder…" 

Apocalyptic fucking. Nothing like it. So deep and wild and hot and desperate. He wanted Jack to thrust into him over and over, deeper and harder than anyone had ever been, screw his cock being tangled in creepers, screw the electric blue-winged butterfly that had just alighted on his wrist, screw the strangled whimpering sounds he was making as he was jolted against stonework and jungle greenery, the harsh rasping sounds Jack was making as he thrust as if it were the only thing keeping him alive. In other worlds he knew they were curled up together under a duvet somewhere, all consideration and cuddling, sweet kisses and tender sex. Well, good luck to those other Jacks and Daniels out there over the rainbow. They should try looking into the maw of their own mortality and see how considerate they felt like being then. He didn't want tender solicitude from Jack right now. The guy loved him. He knew that. The man had saved his life. But what he needed right now was the proof they were both alive, here in this moment, wanted to feel that familiar warm body slamming into his all the way to the root, hitting his prostate with every animal thrust, every cell in his body screaming its way towards orgasm, triumphant, mind-blowing, death-defying ecstasy.

"Yes…!"

They came together. Hard and fast and loud. They both got off too quickly these days. Speed-fuck junkies, as easy to arouse as teenagers, and, like teenagers, able to go from thought to climax in sometimes little more than sixty seconds. So much for tantric sex and it's non-ejaculatory climaxes after two hours of foreplay, half the island was now semen-spattered from mutual moments of 'let's drop 'em and do it now, baby' interaction of the decidedly non-spiritual kind. 

Daniel panted his way back to some kind of mental coherence and felt Jack's weight on his back, chest hair warm against his sweaty skin, a mouth nuzzling at his ear. He turned his head so they could kiss again, Jack's lips so gentle against his, a kiss as sweet as first love. He felt his guts clench at the look in Jack's eyes, the feel of that mouth against his, feeling like weeping then when a moment before he'd been happily lust-dazed in denial. He was losing more than his own life when this island was buried under molten rock and choking ash, he was losing this love as well. "Jack…"

"Ssshhh…" Jack whispered it tenderly then kissed him again, tongue slipping inside his mouth. He was such an incredible kisser, could turn Daniel's bones to water with the way his tongue wrapped itself around his, exploring his mouth like it was a lost continent he was claiming for himself alone. Jack pulled back carefully and his sated cock slid out, leaving Daniel's ass wet and exposed where a moment before it had been warm and secure. He closed his eyes as a finger slid into the vacated tightness. Ironically, after all these days of fuck-fuck-fucking with Jack he would have been a much more sexually skilful husband to Sha're now. Jack had more sexual experience than he did, had long since learned that after the honeymoon period of the first couple of years of a relationship you had to be inventive and considerate if you wanted to stop your partner straying. Especially when you were so often absent and were such an uncommunicative bastard when you were home. You had to make yourself irreplaceable. Someone worth waiting for. No one had ever told Daniel that women could climax over and over if you knew the right buttons to push, he'd thought it was a one-shot deal, at least for a couple of hours. It was Jack who'd told him that they loved you so much more if after you'd shot your mutual bolt together you then gave them something else to remember you by, and then something else again. That your cock could still be flaccid and panting from the last bout, out for the count, but if you had fingers and tongue there was no reason why your wife couldn't still be shrieking your name to the ceiling for the next twenty minutes. 

There was probably something slightly perverted about getting off by talking about cunnilingus on a blood-red beach as the sun sank beneath the waves and turned them both to silhouettes, but they had. Jack had told him women preferred it if you didn't shave before you put your head between their legs, the rasp of chin stubble against sensitive clitoral skin particularly arousing to them. Daniel had wished aloud that someone had told him that about twenty years earlier. Jack had pointed out that given how long it took Daniel to grow more than a pathetically faint fuzz on that baby's bottom skin of his that he'd have to be in preparation for days, meaning Daniel was never going to make it as the cunnilingus champion Jack had undoubtedly been. Daniel had disputed Jack's right to that particular crown. Jack had offered to demonstrate, and from talking about Jack putting his tongue between a woman's legs the conversation had slipped seamlessly into Jack talking about putting his tongue somewhere else. Daniel had confessed he couldn't see the attraction of either doing that or having it done to him. Jack had offered to demonstrate. Daniel had come screaming like a banshee. Then come screaming again as Jack entered the hole he'd prepared with such glottic dexterity and fucked him with slow deep strokes. The seagulls had shrieked their disapproval to the setting sun, scudding clouds passing over them like eavesdroppers. 

It had been the last barrier broken, admitting to one another they still loved their wives, still missed the women they had each watched give birth to a son, still found women desirable. It had added a whole new angle to their love-making, the 'women like it if you do this' demonstration. It wasn't a skill either of them expected to have a use for in the future but it provided another reason for them to make love as the waves broke over them like an unsuccessful chaperone. 

It also gave them a way back to their own heterosexuality, should they ever want to take it. Daniel knew he never would. Not that if he somehow lost Jack but survived himself he would never look at a woman again, he probably would, it was more likely than him looking at a man. It took a greater leap of trust to get naked with another man than it did to do so with another woman – as long as her eyes didn't glow in the dark – and he couldn't imagine ever trusting another guy as much as he trusted Jack. But as long as Jack was alive and with him, he wasn't going to look elsewhere for love. He wasn't so sure about Jack. The man had shown signs of jealousy in the past, had certainly disliked sharing Daniel with anyone else, but that didn't mean he was prepared to give up all possibilities of a return to a role as a husband and father. Here, in this place, with no one else to love but one another and all their shared history already making them closer then brothers even before one added the extra incentive of imminent death to keep them in a perpetual state of arousal, they were all the other one needed. If they ever got home, things might be different. The same Jack O'Neill who had woken him with kisses and whispered endearments for so many consecutive nights might be taking rapid steps away from him if he was ever back in the fold of the US Air Force. Fortunately for their current idyll and unfortunately for their future life expectancy, getting home didn't seem to be a problem they were ever going to have to worry about.

"Hey…" Another kiss, deep and breath-stealing before his ear was licked then teased with gentle nips. "Are you thinking again…?"

Daniel felt a skilful finger stroking his prostate. He'd tried telling Jack he wasn't Sara and couldn't be persuaded to come over and over by being fingered, sucked or tongued after sex, but as Jack had demonstrated several times now that he could indeed be persuaded to come – and not quietly either – he decided to save his breath. He would probably need it for moaning any minute. "I would never do that…" A sharp intake of breath as two fingers were slipped inside him. "Isn't foreplay something you usually do _before_ sex…?"

"This is before sex."

"You're forty-four, Jack."

Another kiss, another nibble of his ear, a probing of two powerful fingers that found exactly the right spot. "I'm going to die. Trust me, age is immaterial."

As Daniel made to twist around and look into his eyes, a hand was applied firmly but not roughly to the back of his head. "Don't get up. Leave that to me."

"I need to pee."

"Good. That'll make it better."

The lizard watched in disapproval as Jack rubbed his soft cock between Daniel's semen-slippery thighs to get himself hard again then kissed a trail down the back of his spine. When his tongue was plunged into Daniel's eager wet opening, Daniel squirmed with pleasure and began to make that whimpering noise which he always denied afterwards, the one that Jack told him made him sound like a girl in the back of her boyfriend's car. Jack brought him to the point of climax with his tongue probing inside him and fingers stroking his perineum, making him squirm and writhe in gasping pleasure, then held his cock to stop the blood escaping as he entered him with another hungry flex of his hips. He came in at a slight angle, thrusting in a rotating grinding motion using the fullness of Daniel's bladder to put pressure on his prostate from two sides at once, evidently carrying an anatomy diagram in his head of where everything was between Daniel's hip bones. They came together again, fast and loud, and Daniel's mouth opened hungrily as Jack shot his load inside him, his tongue feeling as eager as his ass had earlier when it had thought it was about to miss out.

They stumbled back to camp together, tripping over tree roots, kissing whenever they paused for breath, shirts sticking to their sweat-stained skin. Jack nibbled his ear, ruthless about exploiting the hotspot quality of that particular part of Daniel's anatomy, then kissed his cheekbone while Daniel pissed against a tree, the older man murmuring sweet nothings in the ear he was licking even as Daniel spilled a shower of ammonia onto an unsuspecting flower. He thought how absurd it was to be this head over heels in love, lust, and passion with a man he had known for so long. They had been so close for so many years and managed to get through the days easily without ripping off their clothes and doing the wild thing, and now they could barely get through an hour without kissing or fucking, touching or sucking. It was as if some switch had been tripped and now it couldn't be switched off again. They seemed doomed to be deliriously in desire with one another for the rest of their natural lives. Daniel guessed that if the volcano didn't erupt soon they would both be dead of exhaustion.

On their return to the cabin, they bathed in the sea, grateful to be naked despite the heat of the sun overhead, rinsing their clothes in the cold salt water, splashing one another like children, before Daniel sank to his knees in front of Jack's wet, clean, flaccid cock and began to lick it tenderly. He loved it like this, it seemed so delicate, nestling there shyly, like the new boy at school who didn't know anyone yet. Daniel couldn't look at it without wanting to make friends.

"I can't," Jack told him, breathlessly. "This time I really can't."

"S'okay…" Daniel mumbled indistinctly, "I'm happy with it like this. Just like the taste…" Except it was too saltwater clean at the moment, and he missed the musky Jack flavor he was hungry for. When Jack toppled backwards to land with a soft thump on his ass, Daniel just crawled forward and took up residence between his open thighs, determined to get the hang of this deep-throating thing if he had to practice for a week. Jack lay down flat on the beach, making a whimpering noise that Daniel didn't think sounded any too darned masculine either if they were going to start casting aspersions. He brought the concentration he usually only focused on archaeology to solving the problem of how to deep throat. This was a scientific experiment and while it was this soft and slippery, it should be easier to relax his throat and take it in deeper without choking… He sucked on it thoughtfully, running his tongue all around it, thinking that the thickness and length which were so pleasurable in other places were something of a disadvantage here. He'd never been good at breathing through his nose and his gag reflex kicked in much too easily. Definitely things that could be solved with practice though…

"Oh, Danny…"

"Hush, Jack," he told him through a mouthful of rapidly swelling flesh. "I'm busy."

Jack was too exhausted to be much of a participant but his cock was still clearly very aware that it was going to have to cram all the sex it wanted for the rest of its life into these last few days because it swelled very quickly to painful erectness, making Jack moan for release. Daniel decided that this was the most comfortable position he'd found so far for oral sex. With his weight on his arms he sucked on the head of Jack's cock as if it was an ice cream, letting his tongue play all around it before attempting to take it in deeper. He guessed the trick was to breathe around the solid shaft of flesh filling his mouth while relaxing the muscles at the back of his throat, unfortunately the muscles at the back of his throat didn't seem to know how to relax and were clenched in opposition to anything being pushed down between them. Daniel sucked harder, letting the cock push in as deep as he could get it before his gag reflex kicked in, he let it slip in and out rapidly, trying not to let his teeth graze on the sides, pausing to suck hard on the head, run his tongue across the slit, then back to letting it slip in and out as deeply as it could. He was sure that if he just got a bit more practice he could – 

"Oh…Daniel…!"

A stream of hot salty fluid hit the back of his throat and he swallowed in surprise. He licked the head clean automatically then looked up at Jack in mild exasperation. "Damnit, Jack, don't you have any self-control?"

"I'm sorry." Jack lifted his head and rolled his eyes at him. "But you did have my dick in your mouth."

"I'm never going to learn how to deep throat if you keep coming that fast."

Jack put an arm across his eyes, letting his head flop back on the damp side. "If you learn to deep-throat I'll be dead before the volcano even thinks about erupting."

As Daniel opened his mouth to respond, he saw what looked like a storm cloud over the island. Then he realized the rest of the sky was bluer than lapis lazuli. He licked the last of Jack's come from his lips automatically but the day felt cold despite the heat of the sun. "It's thinking about erupting already."

Jack looked at his face then twisted round to follow his gaze. They stared at the smoke together, the wisps of it being coughed up into the sky. When the familiar roll of distant thunder reached them it sounded as if the island was clearing its throat in preparation for a roar. He saw Jack close his eyes in a brief moment of defeat and then open them again with nothing but determination in his gaze. "Let's start building that raft."

It was instinctive to look out at the swelling sea. He could see the height of the waves out beyond the breakers, could imagine the silent approach of the sharks, their dorsal fins cutting a line through the water like the turret of a submarine, but when he turned back to the jungle not a parrot was squawking, not a monkey calling, there was just the silent drift of that dark smoke high above the trees. "Yes," he said quietly. "Let's start on that right now."

***

Hammond wasn't quite sure when they'd acquired Narim as an unpaid research assistant to Major Carter's experiments, but somewhere along the line the Tollan seemed to have taken up semi-regular residence in the SGC. In theory this was a temporary measure while he helped her grapple with the chemical compound of new elements not known to earth scientists and whose properties Major Carter wanted to examine. Narim had justified his inclusion in the experiment to the Tollan by saying that he was there to prevent a tragedy from occurring if she mixed two unstable chemical elements together. His justification to Hammond had been that Major Carter was in need of support from all the friends she had right now. That had been enough to have Hammond wave Narim to the VIP suite and offer him their hospitality for as long as he could get leave to stay.

Teal'c had gone on several missions with other SG teams, all of them ones geographically close to the one from which O'Neill and Doctor Jackson had been escaping at the time the matter stream had split. No one had actually admitted they were using up government resources looking for people who all scientific minds agreed could be anywhere in the galaxy, but there had been a sudden interest in missions to the worlds in the gate system clustering around the place where they had been lost and Hammond had found himself rubber stamping them without a murmur of disagreement. 

He was very aware of the place where Daniel's input should have been. Major Carter had put her faith in scientific equations and it had failed to produce a formula which helped her. Teal'c was putting his faith in commonsense and loyalty, a dogged determination not to give up searching whatever might happen. But they needed something else, something lateral, illogical, something only Daniel Jackson could have thought of…

For the twentieth time he turned back to the reports on his desk and then paused. Something only Daniel Jackson could have thought of might not appear very useful when it was Daniel Jackson who was missing, except they did know where there was another Daniel Jackson, and one who was an ally of sorts.

He was out of his office before he had thought that it would make more sense to pick up the phone, hurrying along the corridors to Major Carter's office and entering without even pausing to knock. She had dark shadows under her eyes and looked up in annoyance at the interruption before she realized it was him. "General…" Evidently mistaking his excitement for stress, her eyes widened in horror. "Not Teal'c? Don't tell me Teal'c is…?"

"SG-3 returned ten minutes ago and Teal'c is fine, Major," he reassured her hastily, barely preventing himself from patting her gently on the shoulder as he did so. The naked fear in her eyes at the thought of losing another loved one had pierced him to the heart. "I've had an idea and I wanted to consult you about it."

"Samantha, I have brought you some more coffee as requested, but as I said earlier I really think stimulants are the last thing you need when you are already unable to sleep –" Seeing Hammond there, Narim broke off in confusion and then made a bow that was surprisingly graceful given the mug of steaming canteen coffee he held in each hand. "General Hammond."

"Just the man I want to see." Hammond closed the door, took one mug from him and handed it to Major Carter. "You two both met the other O'Neill, yes? The one from the different dimension. The one…"

No one said aloud: _The one Doctor Jackson had an affair with_. That was one of those things that was written down nowhere and mentioned aloud by nobody. 

Hammond continued evenly, "The one who befriended Doctor Jackson."

"Yes, sir." Major Carter was holding the mug in her hands gingerly as if her skin had become so sensitive to everything that even warm china could scald her.

"I believe there was also a Doctor Jackson in that dimension who had been made a part of the Stargate Program?"

"You mean the one who…" _The one that O'Neill dumped our Daniel for._ Major Carter cleared her throat. "The one who was recruited to the SGC by that O'Neill after meeting our Daniel."

"I was wondering if you could see any good reason for us not to seek his assistance?" Hammond looked between them expectantly.

Major Carter's mouth was open, her gaze blank. He wondered if she was thinking about how painful it would be to step through the 'gate to another SGC and see her friends alive and well and strangers. It was Narim who said crisply, "No reason at all, General Hammond. Let me return to Tollana immediately and contact the other O'Neill through the quantum mirror."

Hammond was still looking at Major Carter's blank, hurt face but he wrenched his gaze away to nod to Narim. "Thank you, Narim. I would appreciate that very much."

As soon as the door was closed, he said gently, "There's always hope."

She gave him an exhausted smile. "It's the hope that makes it so unbearable. If I knew they were dead I could mourn them, but…" She put a hand up to her face. "I keep thinking of them being out there somewhere, wounded and in need of our help. Teal'c feels the same way."

"I know he does, Major."

She ran a hand through her hair. "When we were in Netu, they never doubted for a minute that Teal'c would get there in time. When the Colonel and I were in Antarctica, he kept telling me I'd work it out, but the fact is, I didn't. Daniel did."

"Doctor Jackson didn't have hypothermia or a wounded man to take care of," Hammond reminded her gently. "When you and Teal'c set such impossible standards for yourselves, is it any wonder you don't always live up to them?"

She looked at him and he saw again how dark were the shadows under her eyes. "Do you really think this could work?"

He sighed and this time did pat her gently on the shoulder. "I think anything is worth trying that might bring two of our people back home again. Don't you, Major?"

The look on her face told him that she wasn't sure she could take the hope, that if she allowed herself to think there was a chance and then that chance turned to nothing, she wasn't sure she could survive it. But her smile was brave and resolute. "Yes, sir. Anything at all."

***

They were in bed when the call came. Despite being daytime, at the prospect of a day off while the technicians played with the light switches during a 'routine maintenance day', they had both decided the only place they wanted to be was the bedroom. Daniel had taken a little coaxing to get him away from an interesting translation he'd brought home with him. O'Neill had been forced to nibble his ear for several seconds before Daniel noticed he was there. There had been a few half-hearted murmurs along the lines of: "Not now, Jack, I'm busy", but O'Neill had been persistent and Daniel, after so many years denied the comforts of touch, was wonderfully susceptible to kisses, caresses, licks, and the all-important sweet nothings. Especially as O'Neill's sweet nothings were sweet somethings these days, and when he whispered in Daniel's ear what he meant to him and how much he wanted him and what it would do to him if he ever lost him, he was telling no more than the truth.

So, at the time the telephone's shrill clamor interrupted them, Daniel was lying naked and supine in O'Neill's king sized bed, artifacts and translations almost entirely forgotten, with O'Neill naked on top of him, kissing him with tender concentration, while Daniel's fingers strayed curiously over O'Neill's scarred, muscled body and their semi-erect cocks jostled together pleasurably in a slow, rhythmic dance. 

O'Neill groaned. "How many tech-johnnies does it take to change a lightbulb anyway?" He snatched up the phone: "O'Neill."

Daniel watched as his eyes widened, the muscle in his jaw tensed, and he changed from relaxed civilian to focused military officer. "Yes, General. We'll be right there."

Daniel groaned silently and banged his head on the pillow. As O'Neill replaced the receiver, and got out of bed, he said, "I hate the military."

O'Neill bent and kissed him, coaxing his mouth open, wrapping his tongue around Daniel's while Daniel showed every sign of sulking. "You love us really," he murmured.

"I love _you_ ," Daniel retorted. "The organization you work for sucks."

"You work for it too."

"Only because of the perks."

O'Neill blinked. "Dental? Medical?"

Daniel slipped a hand between O'Neill's legs. "I was thinking more along the lines of…colonel."

O'Neill swallowed. "So I'm a perk now?"

"You're a whole benefits package wrapped up in one." Daniel craned his neck and began to nuzzle at O'Neill's erection. "You can't go out like this."

O'Neill breathed quickly as Daniel's tongue danced delicately across the head of his cock. "Daniel…we have to be at the SGC as soon as possible. Hammond didn't say why but it sounded urgent."

"We need to shower first." Daniel gave him a look that was all wide-eyed innocence. The eyelash batting that accompanied it, however, was nothing other than seductive.

Everything except O'Neill's resolve immediately hardened. "Okay. But we have to be quick."

Daniel gave him a slow smile, someone who was enjoying the first power he'd been given in his whole emotionally neglected life. "I promise we'll be very quick."

 

They could make as much noise as they liked in the shower, the powerful jets of hot water drowning out even the most passionate cries. When O'Neill had persisted in interrupting Daniel in the midst of a particularly difficult translation of Nabataean script that had left the younger man caffeine-hyped and sleep-deprived, Daniel had observed darkly that someone could be cut up with a chainsaw in that shower without any of the neighbors being any the wiser and he'd be happy to demonstrate if he didn't get some peace and quiet. Now, however, O'Neill was grateful for the roar of the water as it meant he could grunt and groan as much as he liked. 

For all his extraordinary stubbornness and blithe indifference to his own personal safety, not to mention his terrifying curiosity, Daniel did have a passive side as well. It just didn't feel very passive when he was the one luring O'Neill into yet another indiscretion with a very active array of lip-licking, eyelash batting, and seductive little glances, then it felt entirely as if O'Neill was being led around by his dick and his heart by someone very much in control of the situation. However, once they were actively engaged in what that contract they had signed described obliquely as 'bonding rituals', that was when Daniel tended to give him one of those totally brain-melting, groin-hardening 'my hero' looks and let O'Neill do anything he wanted to him. O'Neill had to admit that while, when there was all the time in the world, what he wanted to do to him was to cover him in kisses from head to toe and then lick melted ice cream from his navel before pleasing him in new and interesting ways, when they were pressed for time, his alpha male over-active libido side had been known to swing into action, usually roaring and chest-beating like a mountain gorilla.

"Oh god… Jack…!"

O'Neill hoped that no one – and that meant _no one_ – except him ever found out that the quickest way to stop stubborn, argumentative, non-military Jackson from speaking, thinking, or occasionally even breathing, was to pin him up against a hard surface, preferably under a steady stream of warm water, and pound his prostate until he screamed. 

They had been having such a nice romantic time taking a slow trip around each other's erogenous zones too. He'd planned a much more leisurely shower to follow as well. He'd even bought ice cream. He always had a suspicion that Teal'c wouldn't approve of his alpha male side, and that if Daniel ever winced when sitting down in a briefing Hammond would probably be after him with a lethal weapon as well. Weakly explaining that Daniel really liked it unevolved some days just wasn't going to cut it, so he tried to keep their focus on the romantic nuzzling, licking, kissing and stroking side of love-making. Except when Daniel or the SGC derailed him and enticed his inner caveman out to play…

"Yes, God, yes…! Jack…! No…! Yes…! Harder…!"

There was a knack to getting those jolts of pleasure as cock head impacted with prostate gland to turn into one continuous wave of irradiating ecstasy and O'Neill had learned it years ago during his misspent youth, then polished up the technique during his misspent adulthood, and intended to keep refining it during his misspent advance into middle age. And just because it was so out of character for the younger man, he did take a guilty pleasure in seeing Daniel reach a point of incoherent moaning mindless submission, when O'Neill could do anything he wanted to him and all Daniel would do in response was weakly gasp his acquiescence. Now he scraped Daniel's wet hair back from his face as his hips jerked rhythmically, angling his cock to hit the bulls-eye every time, while kissing that open mouth and dazed open eyes. He could see Daniel was heading for orgasm, face beginning to screw up, eyes fixed on a distant point somewhere inside his own body, and he hadn't even touched his erection yet, just this was enough, O'Neill driving into him with these deep rapid thrusts.

Daniel came with his fingers splayed against the wet tiles, pouring himself into the jet of water, back arching, screaming something incoherent that was immediately swallowed by the sound of the shower and the kiss O'Neill planted on his mouth. He kept fucking him through his orgasm, the way Daniel liked it, milking the last drop of pleasure from him. When Daniel's legs gave out, he lowered him carefully to the tiled floor of the shower and curled around him, still jerking his hips steadily in that way that made Daniel whimper in blind reaction. He kissed him tenderly, working his tongue in between Daniel's parted lips, waiting for Daniel to come back from wherever it was he went to after a really spectacular climax. He watched Daniel's eyelashes fluttering, saw a tongue flicker maddeningly over wet lips, and then Daniel was focusing on him, giving him a sideways look over his shoulder of awed admiration that made him feel simultaneously ten feet tall and unworthy to so much as look at him, let alone get to spend the rest of his life with him.

"How do you do that…?" Daniel asked breathlessly, eyes closing with pleasure as another thrust brushed his prostate, looking for all the world like a cat being stroked.

O'Neill moved his hips again, gently now, not worried about his own climax, just loving seeing what it did to Daniel to feel O'Neill's cock inside him. He saw Daniel's mouth open spasmodically, closing his eyes as he moved back into the rhythm. "Practice," O'Neill admitted. 

Daniel was panting, eyes fluttering closed again as he continued to move himself back onto O'Neill's cock, stimulating his prostate with unashamed pleasure. "I knew there had to be an upside to marrying the SGC Casanova."

O'Neill kissed him in mute apology for his checkered past. "We have to go."

"I want to come again."

"Daniel, we're late." 

Daniel looked at him over his shoulder and then tightened around O'Neill's cock. "Fuck me again, Flyboy. You know you want to. And if you still don't come I'll suck you until you do."

 

Three minutes later only the keenest-eared neighbors would have heard someone screaming "Jack…!" at the top of his lungs. And approximately ninety seconds after that, it would have taken specialist listening equipment to catch that moaned 'Daniel…' that was gasped in such helpless adoration.

***

It was strange to step through the quantum mirror themselves after so long. To touch it and feel the blue light shimmer through them. Stranger still to be traveling with General Hammond and Narim in the places O'Neill and Daniel Jackson should have been occupying. 

Beside him, Teal'c felt Major Carter barely swallow a gasp as she saw the two of them standing at the bottom of the ramp in the 'gateroom, their missing teammates, alive and whole and well. Except it was not them, of course, but their doubles from a different dimension. Narim gave Major Carter a look of sympathy, resting his hand on her arm, and Teal'c wondered if this was the real reason why Hammond had suggested the Tollan accompanied them, so he could help their friend through what was clearly going to be a traumatic experience. He was also feeling a little disorientated by seeing the two men standing there. He had been dreaming about O'Neill and Daniel Jackson for weeks now, imagining them calling out to him, finding them only to lose them again in nightmare after nightmare. Waking to a renewed sense of failure, a renewed ache of grief.

They had met this O'Neill before, which helped a little, he not only looked like the O'Neill they had lost, but like himself, hair a little darker than the one they knew, less lines on his face. But the Daniel Jackson was a shock to both of them. Like the friend they had lost, but not as they had last seen him, the way he had been when they had first met him. His blue eyes looked at them with open curiosity, full of trust, and then a widening of surprise as he recognized them. His hair was long, trailing into his eyes, thick dark gold in color framing skin of astonishing purity, and a mouth now partially opened in confusion as he saw them coming down the ramp. Beside him the Captain Carter they had first seen in the quantum mirror was telling him about entropic cascade failure but Teal'c doubted that this other Daniel Jackson was taking in her words, he was too fascinated by them. As he drew nearer to the other Carter, he felt the presence of a naquada-based symbiote and exchanged a glance with Major Carter, who also winced.

"I am Tok'ra." Captain Carter's eyes flashed briefly. "I am Khenara. Captain Carter bravely offered to blend with me when there was no other hope for my survival." The golden glow faded and Captain Carter smiled ruefully. "I didn't have too many options myself at the time."

"Good to see you again." Colonel O'Neill stepped forward and touched Teal'c briefly on the shoulder, nodding respectfully to Hammond. "May I introduce…Doctor Daniel Jackson."

The pride in Colonel O'Neill's voice, which he had so clearly tried and failed to suppress, made Teal'c look at him sharply. Daniel Jackson had told him that this O'Neill had fallen in love with the Daniel Jackson in his dimension but Teal'c had presumed the young man was simply now the object of his desires, his next conquest. But the expression on the colonel's face as he looked at the young man beside him was bordering on doting.

"Pleased to meet you." Doctor Jackson smiled at them and shook Teal'c's hand. "This is incredible. I've read the reports about alternate realities but I never thought I'd actually get to meet anyone from a different…dimension." He turned to Major Carter, and although Teal'c suspected she, like he, had been feeling an unadmitted hostility towards this young man before, not just for having seduced the other O'Neill away from their Daniel Jackson, but for being alive and well when theirs was missing and possibly dead, he now saw her visibly falter. This version of Daniel Jackson was not just too here and too real, too three-dimensionally whole and untouched, he was too innocent and unbruised by life as well. There was nothing in his eyes but curiosity and kindness, the way their Daniel had used to look before fate had decided to abuse his trust so many times. Seeing Doctor Jackson was reminding Teal'c of how sweet their missing teammate still was, despite the second skin he'd been forced to grow of waspish asides and brittle irony, there was still a bewilderment about him when confronted with cruelty or injustice, a disbelief that the human race could be capable of such things, an inherent belief in the goodness in all species, a child of the universe expecting to make friends wherever he went, astonished when people wanted instead to be his enemy. This was like seeing their own Daniel without his defenses in place, the inner man who Daniel too often kept hidden from the world these days.

O'Neill saw their expressions and winced. "This must be pretty weird for you."

"Yes." Major Carter was still staring at Doctor Jackson as if he were a ghost. She looked up at O'Neill with an attempt at a smile. "It's just been so long since we've seen them…"

"Let's go to my office." The other Hammond had been exchanging formal greetings with their own but he now gave Major Carter a paternal glance of sympathy and waved them towards the exit. "I understand you're hoping to pick our Doctor Jackson's brains?"

General Hammond cleared his throat awkwardly, "Well, when our Captain Carter and Colonel O'Neill were trapped in Antarctica, it was Doctor Jackson who perceived how to get them back and – "

"Daniel was the one who worked out how to open the Stargate," Major Carter added, speaking rapidly, her eyes bright with tears or fever or a combination of both. Teal'c laid a gentle hand on her shoulder but she continued to speak with the same swift enthusiasm. "We thought it was some kind of equation or symbol. We were trying go through all these old books on ancient alphabets. Do you know how many ancient alphabets there are? And how, if you don't know what they mean they all start to look the same after a while. You stare at the symbols and the alphabets and you realize you've been doing it for hours and have no idea what you've even learned. So Katherine thought we needed a linguist, someone who understood all these alphabets and might recognize a really obscure one, and someone who could think his way around corners – that was what she said. So she went and got Daniel – and you know what was the really funny thing? – it wasn't an alphabet at all – and, of course you know that because you got yours to work too – but I always thought it was kind of ironic that we were all sitting there, all these astrophysicists thinking we were looking at an alphabet and it took a linguist to tell us we were really looking at the constellations." She smiled at them brightly but there were undoubtedly unshed tears in her eyes.

General Hammond spoke to his counterpart with an apologetic wince. "As I'm sure you know, General, SG teams form very close bonds with one another."

"I know." The other Hammond gave Major Carter a look that was full of sympathy. "And I know what it's like when you think you've lost one of your own."

Major Carter gave them a brief smile but then turned to her counterpart, clearly thinking she would be the most understanding, and launched into another description of all Daniel Jackson's moments of thinking laterally, of problem solving and clear-headedness even in times of great stress. Captain Carter nodded in sympathy and put an arm around Major Carter's shoulders, but the glance she shot at Teal'c was one full of distress. Teal'c only nodded to her quietly. He needed no one else to tell him his teammate was hanging on by her fingernails, that the strain of having two friends lost and being unable to find them was wearing her nerves to shreds. "I don't worry so much about the colonel because he's a soldier and he knows how to…but Daniel… And then I think that Daniel always falls on his feet because everyone loves him when they meet him, but the colonel isn't good with other people. He can seem rude sometimes and… Then I think that Daniel's just a civilian and he doesn't really know how…bad people can be sometimes, and what if a Goa'uld found them or slave traders or… what if they're hurt…?"

Doctor Jackson was trying to comfort her, talking about coming back to their dimension and taking as long as was needed to help her. Colonel O'Neill seemed grim yet with a faraway look in his eyes. Teal'c wondered how it felt to hear that your ex-lover was lost when your own lover was safe and well beside you, if the guilt at your own relief was crippling.

Captain Carter was talking about equations and Narim was interrupting quietly, telling her that they had already tried all those calculations without success. It was odd to be one of a team of four again, right and yet so wrong, although Hammond was very dear to him, and he had become fond of Narim over all these weeks when the Tollan had proven to be such a good friend to Major Carter, the only team he wanted to be a part of was one that was led by O'Neill and containing himself, Major Carter, and Daniel Jackson.

As soon as they were in the other General Hammond's office, O'Neill said quietly, "I know how to find the Daniel from your dimension."

They all looked at him in disbelief and he rubbed his jaw in embarrassment. "Not because I can do better math than the Tollan or Carter, or have a more lateral mind than Daniel, or –" and here he stole a look at the young Doctor Jackson, "because he and I have a psychic connection so strong that even the bonds of time and space can't break it. I can find him because I was afraid of losing him so I took steps accordingly."

The other Hammond said quietly, "Explain, Colonel?"

O'Neill looked between them with slight defiance, deliberately avoiding only Narim's eyes. "Look, when I first met him he was unconscious after having being pounded half to death by this guy he was still trying to reason with the next time he met him. He had no more sense of self-preservation than a bottle of soda pop. He used to go around throwing himself at armed serpent guards, for crying out loud!"

Hammond said quietly, "We know what our own Doctor Jackson is like, Colonel."

O'Neill ran a hand through his hair. It was still brown, Teal'c noted, barely streaked with gray. He wondered how long it would be before this man's hair was as silver as that of the O'Neill he knew. "He was crossing dimensions to see me. I was having nightmares worrying about what happened if Kawalsky or I screwed up and he got lost somewhere in transit. So I asked the Tollan for help. I knew they had the technology, they'd shown it to us the last time we were there. It was based on their health-monitoring system but it worked over much greater distances, and they were experimenting with inter-dimensional physics. We saved their damned world, I figured the least they could do was…" He shrugged.

It was Narim who got it. Looking at O'Neill levelly he said, "You stole the prototype of the omacore tracking device?"

O'Neill faced him defiantly. "I borrowed it, but only because you guys wouldn't lend it to me the way I asked." Seeing Narim's expression he threw up his hands. "You had all the blueprints! It wasn't like you couldn't make another one. I needed the prototype more than you did. So I…borrowed it."

"In our dimension, Colonel, the prototype would have to be physically injected under the epidermis of the skin of the person you were hoping to track. It could not afterwards be retrieved or re-used."

O'Neill scratched his jaw. "Well, yeah, it's pretty much the same here."

"In my dimension 'borrowing' suggests something on temporary loan that can later be returned in more or less the condition in which it was found…"

"Okay! Okay! I stole it! I stole it and I injected it into Doc so I could find him again if he got lost. I did it when he was asleep. He didn't even know. And then I fell in love with…" He looked at Doctor Jackson, who was gazing at him with a stricken look on his face. He winced. "And then I fell in love with Daniel and I broke up with Doc and…there didn't seem a reason to tell him he had some alien technology in his bloodstream. It wasn't going to get him into trouble with anyone. It was undetectable on a MRI, and it wasn't as if he was the one who'd stolen it."

Narim sighed and looked at the ground. "The O'Neill in our dimension also asked if he could use the prototype to keep track of his teammates. I turned him down."

"Well, you did the same here. But sometimes it's not a good idea to take 'no' for an answer, so I didn't." He looked at his Hammond and winced. "I'm sorry, sir. I was just so worried about Doc – and I felt so damned guilty. I figured the least I could do was keep him safe."

In response, Hammond glowered at O'Neill. "To make up for the way you were exploiting a diplomatic initiative to seduce one of my people, you mean?"

Teal'c and Major Carter both looked at Hammond in surprise and saw the man was furious. Teal'c got a glimmer of what a possible suitor for Hammond's daughters would have faced had his intentions been anything other than honorable.

O'Neill looked at him in shock. "What? I didn't… I mean…"

The gaze Hammond fixed on O'Neill was not one Teal'c would ever have wanted directed his way. "That would be why you used the Doctor Jackson from our dimension for your own sexual gratification for several weeks before dumping him when you tired of him, would it, Colonel?"

"It wasn't like that." O'Neill looked at the young man beside him. "I just fell in love with someone else. It wasn't as if he was in love with me. He was already in love with…" Evidently remembering in time that the regulations might be different on their world, he broke off awkwardly. "Let's just try and get him back, shall we? I'm presuming wherever he is, his O'Neill is with him so we should be able to find both of them."

"You have the controls for the tracking device?" Narim enquired.

O'Neill looked sheepish. "Yes, I borrowed…stole that too. The Narim in my dimension covered up for me. He has a thing for Carter here so he tends to cut us a lot of slack." He jerked his head at his 2IC.

"Words fail me, Colonel," the other Hammond said in disbelief. 

It was Teal'c who said quietly, "Surely the important matter is that we now may be able to find the whereabouts of Daniel Jackson and Colonel O'Neill?"

The fair-haired Doctor Jackson nodded his head, turning to Hammond. "Sir, Teal'c is right. We can apologize to the Tollan afterwards. The main point is that these people have lost their friends and we may be able to help them get them back."

"You cannot assist us to do anything, Doctor Jackson," Teal'c told him gently. "Entropic cascade failure means you cannot accompany us back to our dimension for longer than forty-eight hours without risking losing your own corporeal integrity."

"We want to help," O'Neill put in. "Look, your Daniel is a friend of mine. He's important to me. I…need to know he's okay." The glance he darted at the young man beside him pleaded not just for understanding but absolution.

Doctor Jackson man looked pale but he found a watery smile. "I understand." But the light had gone from his face and he looked as if he had lost some part of himself between the 'gateroom and this conversation.

"They can accompany you," Narim put in quietly. "We have also been experimenting with quantum mirror physics and we have found a way to create a field of stability around a traveler in a dimension in which a living counterpart already exists. It effectively maintains the traveler within his own dimension even as he travels in the other one, or at least makes his body believe that – "

"No one cares," O'Neill told him swiftly, anxiety making his temper ragged, Teal'c noticed, in much the same way as it did with the O'Neill they knew. Hearing that Daniel Jackson was missing and possibly dead had clearly affected him strongly.

"I think what Jack means, Narim," the young man looked at O'Neill briefly before turning back to the Tollan, "is that we would be very grateful if you would allow us to use this technology to accompany the other SG-1 in their search for Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson, but we aren't necessarily able to understand the complexities of the science involved."

Narim inclined his head. "A timely reminder, Doctor Jackson. Let us by all means stick to the essentials."

As Teal'c went to walk past the two Hammonds he heard the one from his dimension muttering darkly: "…sure he is a good man, General, the one in my dimension is, but tell me, if it was the O'Neill from _my_ dimension who'd got the Doctor Jackson from _your_ dimension into bed, how would you react…?"

Teal'c automatically followed the general's gaze to Doctor Jackson. He had a hand on Major Carter's arm and was talking to her gently, trying to get her to smile. She was wiping tears from her face but half-laughing at the same time. The uniform the young man was wearing looked at least two sizes too big for him and he had pulled the sleeves of his jacket down into his palms, tugging on them out of habit without even seeming to know that he was doing it. When he looked across at O'Neill, he wrapped his arms around himself, self-hugging in a way all too reminiscent of the Daniel Jackson they had lost when feeling unhappy.

The other Hammond said grimly, "I'd come after him with a P-90, General." 

"Then you know how I feel right now."

O'Neill said shortly, "Let's get this show on the road, shall we? I'll go and get the tracking monitor and meet you in the 'gateroom." He caught the eye of General Hammond. "If that's all right with you, sir?"

His C.O. sighed. "Yes, Colonel. You and Doctor Jackson may accompany General Hammond and his party in their search for the Doctor Jackson and O'Neill from their dimension. You may leave as soon as you have everything you need."

Teal'c watched the fair-haired Doctor Jackson watching O'Neill leave the room without a backward glance, leaving the door to the corridor open, boots loud on the gray-colored flooring as he broke into a run. He wrapped his arms more tightly around himself but found a smile for Major Carter, saying, "I'm sure they'll be fine. The Jack I know is very good in a crisis and I'm sure the one in your world is no different." His gaze strayed back to the doorway through which O'Neill had departed and the look in his eyes was full of longing. Despite being determined to keep a critical distance from these other dimensional counterparts, when looking at the wistful expression on the face of this Daniel Jackson, Teal'c found it a little more difficult than in the past to convince himself that theirs was the only reality of consequence.

As Teal'c made to ask Narim for an explanation of how the Tollan technology worked to offset the effects of entropic cascade failure, a man burst into the room with only the vaguest attempt at a knock. Teal'c recognized him at once – how could he not when he had once killed him? – but the dark-haired powerful-looking soldier cast only the most cursory glance in their direction before looking at the other Hammond. "Is it true, sir?" He glared at them then, a brief raking glance over his shoulder. "Did these people lose Doctor Jackson?"

The other Hammond spoke calmly, "There was an overload of power to the 'gate system, Major. It seems that the stream split and the Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson from the other dimension were sent to a different location. We are going to offer these people every assistance in retrieving their missing teammates."

"Permission to accompany them, sir?"

Teal'c remembered now that Major Kawalsky had always had that terrier-like energy, that decisive way of moving and talking, impatient and straightforward to the point of bluntness. Now he was not just focused, he was trembling with suppressed rage.

Hammond said quietly, "Permission refused, Major."

"Sir?" Kawalsky looked at him in disbelief. "With respect, general, as I'm the only one here who is dead in the dimension Doc comes from I wouldn't even need to wear that Tollan thing the others are going to have to put on. And I want to be there. I…need to be there."

As the man turned his head, Teal'c saw his face and saw how stricken he looked, his grief and anxiety transmuted into rage.

"No, Major."

"You're letting Daniel go and you're not letting me go?"

Hammond said quietly, "General Hammond specifically requested the assistance of Doctor Jackson in this matter, but there is a limit to how many of my key personnel I am willing to commit to this venture."

"What, so as they've lost their own Daniel you're going to lend them ours? I wouldn't let these people take my dog for a walk!" Kawalsky wheeled on them, unable to vent his frustration at Hammond as the man was his CO, but needing to strike out at someone. "What were you people thinking anyway? Christ, five minutes with Doc and I could see he wasn't safe to be let out without a keeper. You've known him how long and you didn't think to keep him close by? Why didn't you keep an eye on him? Do you make a habit of losing your civilians? The colonel and I managed to chaperone him through sixteen different dimensions without him picking up even a scratch. What the hell do you do with archaeologists in your dimension, play Russian Roulette with them?"

"Major Kawalsky!" The other Hammond barked out the man's name angrily. "That is a lot more than enough from you on this matter."

General Hammond interceded quickly, patting Kawalsky on the shoulder. "That's okay, son. I understand your frustration, really I do. Every time Doctor Jackson goes missing I feel it take another few years off my life too, and I promise you no harm will come to your Doctor Jackson while he is in our universe."

Kawalsky ran a hand through his hair, bowing his head in defeat, looking at Hammond in undisguised misery. "I'm sorry, General, but I got fond of him, you know? Me and the colonel, we spent a lot of time with him. He's a good kid but he's too damned trusting. Our Daniel's the same. That's why we don't let him run off and play by himself. It's just not safe."

Teal'c saw their Hammond smile, despite the lines of tension on his face. Doctor Jackson looked a little indignant, mouth opening to protest, but he refrained from comment as Hammond patted Kawalsky gently again, explained that he was already taking enough of their dimension's resources by borrowing Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson but he was extending an invitation right now for Kawalsky to come and see for himself that Doctor Jackson was well once they got him back. His tone admitted no possibility that Doctor Jackson might not be coming back but Teal'c saw the flicker of anguish in his eyes he had worked so hard to disguise. He saw Hammond's counterpart notice it as well, and was not surprised when they were ushered out of the room so the two Hammonds could talk in private.

Out in the corridor, Teal'c regarded Kawalsky levelly as the major gazed at him, trying not to think of him the way he'd last seen him, with his eyes glowing gold then glazing into the vacant stare of a dead man. 

"Just get him back," Kawalsky said quietly. 

"We will certainly do our best to retrieve Daniel Jackson and Colonel O'Neill from wherever they may have been sent, Major Kawalsky," Teal'c said gently.

The man nodded, took a deep breath as he steeled himself to wish them well when he was clearly still bursting to accompany them and unable to believe they would succeed without his assistance. Then he slapped Teal'c on the arm in farewell, shook hands with Major Carter, nodded to Narim, and then turned to Doctor Jackson. He squeezed his shoulders briefly then stood back, saying sternly, "Just for once, do what the Colonel tells you, don't touch anything you're not supposed to, wander off, or start making nice with the natives." He straightened his blue BDU jacket automatically, reminding Teal'c of an anxious mother sending her child off for his first day of schooling. "Remember, not everyone who wants to show you his etchings is interested in mythology. And be careful. Don't go into any new ruins until someone with a gun has told you it's clear. Okay?"

Doctor Jackson sighed in resignation and Teal'c presumed that he was often subjected to fussing tirades of this kind by the older man. "Yes, Kawalsky. I promise to look both ways before I cross the road as well."

"Well, that would be an improvement on your wandering across it with your head in a book the way you usually do."

Teal'c thought with some relief that neither he nor O'Neill at their most absurdly over-protective had ever made such a public spectacle of themselves and Daniel Jackson as Major Kawalsky was doing now. The young man darted them an embarrassed glance to see if they were watching the Major's display, murmuring, "Kawalsky, please, I'll be fine."

"Check your bootlaces. Double knot them this time. And take a coat. Doc never had a coat. I swear wherever he is he'll have pneumonia by now." Kawalsky rubbed his forehead as if to ward off a headache and Teal'c saw a shadow pass across his face, the raw anxiety for the lost Daniel Jackson he was barely able to suppress increased by his obvious conviction that if he let this young man out of his sight he was going to vanish too. He gave the young man a last pat on the shoulder before briskly wishing them all luck and walking straight-backed down the corridor. Ten yards down the gray passageway he turned and said, "And once you've got him back, put him on a goddamned leash, will ya?" He looked at Doctor Jackson again and shook his head. "And I swear to God if anything happens to our Daniel while he's in your universe I will come and hunt you down like a goddamned ashrak. Do I make myself clear?"

Teal'c smiled for what felt like the first time in days, inclined his head and said, "Indeed."

***

O'Neill found it odd to have everyone looking at him as if he were a ghost when he knew he was alive and well. Doc had told him about the time he had slipped out of phase and become invisible and inaudible to everyone he knew except his insane grandfather. He had described what it felt like when people walked right through you without knowing you were there. Right now, O'Neill thought he might have preferred that to the way everybody kept staring at him. They were doing double-takes when they looked at Daniel too, then getting that look on their faces he had quickly learned to dread, that expression of sorrow and regret. 

The Janet Fraiser in this world obviously didn't dislike O'Neill the way she disliked him in his universe. She had been very gentle with him during his physical, a wistful look in her eyes as she examined him and clearly wished that he was the other O'Neill, not this stranger with her friend's face, but still kind to him for his own sake. But to Daniel she had been even kinder, brisk and good-humored and doting at the same time, surprised by the place where his appendix scar wasn't, fingers brushing the skin there lightly and warning him that he must monitor his own health very carefully in case his appendix was also building up for implosion. When she looked up at Daniel out of those big brown eyes, chest heaving a little under the white coat with her anxiety over the prospect of Daniel failing to report a fever or persistent feeling of nausea the way the Daniel from her dimension evidently had, then he'd finally got what the other guys saw. Finally understood why Kawalsky was always checking into sickbay even if all he had was a splinter in his finger in the hope that Doc Fraiser might kiss it better for him. Or at least make him the center of her attention while she was bandaging him up. When she was being nice to you, Janet Fraiser pretty much took the breath away, and although he had felt an instinctive clench of hostility when her slim fingers were anxiously palpitating Daniel's appendix area for any swelling or tenderness, he could forgive her a lot for looking so beautiful as she fussed over his Daniel.

They were all very kind to his Daniel, albeit inclined to treat him like a child, always offering him chocolate and cookies and the inevitable mugs of coffee. They seemed to think that because this version of Daniel Jackson looked the same way theirs had done a few years before, this one was somehow younger than theirs. He sometimes felt that what his Daniel represented to them was a chance to make amends for the past, as if they could somehow undo any wrongs that might have been done to the Daniel they knew by being extra kind to this one. But it didn't work that way. He had been as kind and loving as anyone could be to this Daniel but it didn't make a pinch of difference to the way he'd treated that other one.

His Daniel, in his turn, was being very kind to the Carter from this dimension, and if he hadn't felt so damned sorry for her himself, O'Neill might have felt a little jealous. She was beautiful after all. He'd got used to his own Carter and they kind of annoyed each other a lot of the time. They were different kinds of soldiers, she was all book-learning and rule-following whereas he had always preferred to play it by ear. They had a lot of mutual respect for one another's abilities, but there had never been the slightest spark of attraction between them. It had taken them a while to get fond of one another, to see past the flakiness she perceived in him and for him to see past the rigidity he saw in her, before they could accept that there was a lot more to the other than met the eye. It wasn't until the whole Tok'ra business that he'd realized Captain Knowitall was someone he'd gotten a lot fonder of than he'd thought, that it hurt like hell to think of her being a Goa'uld now, and that it had been one hell of a relief to get her back more or less unscathed when they'd thought her gone for good. And after that she'd seemed somehow, ironically, more human, even though her blood now had naquadah running through it and there was a protein marker in her somewhere that sent out a beacon to every Goa'uld in the galaxy that she'd once been like them. When they'd met Martouf and he'd watched her light up like a schoolgirl as they walked around one another, hardly daring to believe the other one was real, he'd felt positively fond of her, indulgent as an uncle with a favorite niece. This Carter was different, not least because she was halfway to being a basket case. It had made him realize that he was damned good for the Carter in his dimension because he would never have let the one he knew get to this point. Everyone kept tip-toeing around her, talking in soothing tones, when what she needed was for someone to tell her plain and simple that she wasn't superhuman and it therefore wasn't her fault if she couldn't solve any problem, couldn't right every wrong.

Daniel was more or less telling her that, but he was doing it gently over broken cookies and squares of imported chocolate while they waited for her father to get to the meeting point and then send them word.

She'd been helped straight away by the fact the tracking device gave her something to do. As soon as they'd arrived back in the right dimension on Tollana, it had started to bleep. He'd told Narim crossly he thought they ought to make it function trans-dimensionally and if he'd known it only sent its signal across one lousy universe he would never have bothered stealing it. But he hadn't been able to hide his relief when they'd seen that green pulse on the little blue screen of the tracking device. A red pulse would have meant the tracking device was functioning but the person into which it had been implanted was not. Green was very, very good in this instance. And, he had to admit that although he loved Daniel and would never ever look at anyone else again, when the relieved and ecstatic Carter had thrown her arms around his neck and kissed him right on the mouth, soft lips against his own, soft breasts against his chest, he hadn't exactly minded and his groin had actually twitched. It was just as well she'd done that really because the amount of time his Daniel had spent with her since they got here, he would have been wanting to punch her out if he hadn't seen for himself she was ready to throw her arms around even a total stranger's neck in her relief at hearing that her Daniel was alive. And yes, he'd been incredibly relieved when they'd got that confirmation himself. He'd been all knotted up inside with anxiety from when they'd first given him the news that the guy who he'd first seen unconscious at his feet in a Goa'uld prison cell might now be a corpse. He knew this universe's Hammond thought he was a heartless Lothario who'd 'wham bam, thank you mister'ed their Daniel halfway to a broken heart before dumping him, but he was never going to be able to explain to people just how fond he had been of that guy. It had been for both their sakes that he'd called it a day. Because that Daniel had deserved better than being screwed by someone who didn't love him with all his heart, and because as long as he was confusing things between them, Daniel was never going to admit to his own O'Neill how he really felt. He was between a rock and a hard place at the moment. If he protested how much the lost Daniel had meant to him he put that look of sorrow in his own Daniel's eyes, if he didn't, they'd think he was a user who had never appreciated just how special the Daniel from their dimension was. He figured it was a lose-lose situation and held his tongue.

His own Daniel was being very quiet. He was sweet to O'Neill, not at all pissy – the way he could get sometimes when things didn't go the way he liked – but very gentle and supportive. The way you would be with someone who was worried about a loved one. He didn't understand how after all they'd been through together, Daniel couldn't know that he was the one he loved, had always been the one he loved. But he still didn't seem to know that. He'd been secure and happy for a few weeks, that was all, and known himself to be the center of O'Neill's world, but all it had taken was a mention of the other Daniel, some proof that O'Neill still cared for him, and he'd gone right back to assuming that the other Daniel must be the real love of O'Neill's life. Which made his behavior right now heartbreakingly heroic, because no one had done more to help the other Carter find these guys than he had. She and Narim had gone nearly loco trying to match up a configuration on a Tollan device with the 'gate system as set up on the SGC computers, and Daniel had sat there with them the whole time while they spouted incomprehensible gobbledegook. Daniel was the one who had seen those patterns in the star systems which they knew too much to see, pointing out that it didn't matter what the logarithms were telling them, not to worry about matrixes and vectors or whatever math-hell they were talking about, just to match up the two patterns, find a correlation in the overall picture that made some kind of sense. 

O'Neill didn't think Carter had slept for about seventy-two hours straight and Narim and Daniel had sat up in that control room with her, inputting data, drinking coffee, swearing quietly in a variety of languages – including Tollanan – when the calculations hadn't come out right. And then abruptly they'd cracked it. Laid one pattern down on top of another and managed to retrieve the 'gate coordinates for where those two lost travelers had been accidentally sent.

He didn't think anyone had been truly surprised when the seventh chevron had failed to engage, but there had still been a collective slump of disappointment.

But Carter was as hyped up on caffeine as Daniel by that point and she'd only taken a few seconds to bow her head in despair before she was insisting that it didn't matter that they couldn't get there by 'gate travel, of course they couldn't get there by 'gate travel, if the 'gate had been working, O'Neill and Daniel would be back by now, and didn't everyone see this was a _good_ thing because it meant it probably wasn't imprisonment or infirmity preventing them from 'gateing home, just a blowout from the overload of power when they'd been sent through there in the first place. And now permission to contact the Tok'ra, General, she was sure they'd be happy to lend them a ship. 

The slightly manic light in her eyes told O'Neill that if the Tok'ra thought about _not_ lending them a ship they were going to regret it because Carter was going to be straight over to Vorash stringing people up by their reproductive organs until they changed their minds. Luckily, the Tollan had managed to get a message through that day and the Tok'ra had declared themselves delighted to lend the Tau'ri a ship and to send Jacob along to pilot her. They hadn't even asked for any first-born children in exchange, reminding O'Neill once again that the Tok'ra were occasionally a lot more human than they liked to let on. Either that or they had gone soft over Daniel as well. He thought that was equally possible. As soon as word came from Jacob that he had landed on the next planet in the 'gate system, they could travel out there to meet him, then they'd all take a tel'tak to go and pick O'Neill and Doc up from wherever they'd been stranded.

When he thought of the Daniel who had once been his lover alone with that other O'Neill, he did feel a prickling of jealousy, but he bit it down. The important thing was that Daniel should be okay, and at least the other O'Neill was a combat experienced veteran of black ops and myriad weird shit who ought to be able to keep him alive. And this O'Neill was in love with someone else now. That alpha male competitive side certainly hadn't looked too edifying on the other O'Neill and it didn't feel any more evolved coming from him. There was a part of him that still thought no one could look after Daniel the way he could, and that went for any Daniel in any universe, except the truth was that on their last mission Daniel had looked after himself, and it was Teal'c who'd saved him from Heru'ur, not O'Neill.

His Daniel had told this dimension's Teal'c all about it, what a wonderful guy his other universe counterpart was, Daniel's blue eyes shining behind his spectacles the way they did when he was truly enthused. O'Neill had felt another spasm of jealousy and had to remind himself firmly that to Daniel Teal'c was a kind of father figure, the hero-worship was just something they were all going to have to live with, and if Daniel was guilty of it where Teal'c was concerned, so too were half the Jaffa of Chulak who had elevated the guy to minor deity status and elected him their leader. O'Neill always felt he was being weighed and found wanting by the Teal'c in his own dimension, the man had a way of looking him over that was too reminiscent of a disappointed father whose favorite child had hooked up with a hoodlum. He suspected it was going to take at least a decade of Daniel-worship on his part before Teal'c began to cut him a little slack. 

It had been worth the Teal'c of his world being such a godlike hero figure though just to see the look on the face of the Teal'c of this world when Daniel told him about the guy and the way he had risked everything to rescue Daniel from Heru'ur. The most extraordinary expression of relief had spread over the Jaffa's face, as if a great burden had been lifted from his back.

"Is something wrong?" Daniel asked gently.

Teal'c shook his head. "No, Doctor Jackson. It is only that when all one's other selves are men of evil one cannot help wondering if the same darkness…"

"I doubt any of them were evil, Teal'c." Daniel looked horrified at the idea. "I've only met two of you but you both seem men of great courage and honor to me. Those other versions of you must be good men at heart as well, I expect it was just some fork in the road that sent them down the wrong path."

O'Neill loved Daniel's childlike certainties too much to want to interfere with them, but he and Teal'c exchanged a glance and he knew they were both remembering that Teal'c who had beaten Daniel so brutally, blasted a death-sized hole in O'Neill's chest, and been about to fuck Daniel raw when the Teal'c in front of him had killed the sonofabitch stone dead. He rather doubted that guy had been a good man at heart. On the other hand this Teal'c had sacrificed everything he had, position, preferment, home, family, with no hope of any gain for himself, just because he couldn't stand by and watch innocents die one more time. And the Teal'c who had saved Daniel from Heru'ur was a genuine hero among men. O'Neill said gently, "I think there's good and bad in all of us, Daniel. In some realities the bad wins out, in some the good. It's even possible that in some universes there is a Jack O'Neill who isn't perfect in every way."

Daniel moistened his lips. "Surely not."

O'Neill sighed. "Hard though it is for you to believe, even that could happen."

"Apparently you're married to Sam in some of them."

O'Neill wrinkled his nose in disbelief then remembered the soft squish of Major Carter's breasts against his chest as she hugged him, the warm pressure of her lips against his mouth, and had to acknowledge that an O'Neill who thought with his dick more than his commonsense and didn't mind hooking up with someone who talked incomprehensible gibberish to him twenty-four hours a day, might well be tempted by Carter's undeniable assets. "Only in universes where you're not on the Stargate program, I bet, and that version of me doesn't know you exist."

Daniel frowned at that and O'Neill thought how cute he looked when he frowned and how if Teal'c hadn't been in the room with them he would have had to kiss him. "I don't like to think of there being universes where you and I haven't met, Jack." He looked up at O'Neill then and the expression in his eyes took O'Neill's breath away. Daniel didn't even know he was looking like that, he was sure, so wistful and so painfully in love. 

O'Neill darted Teal'c a begging look and the Jaffa immediately got to his feet and said he needed to go and speak to Major Carter. O'Neill barely waited for the door to close behind him before he had Daniel in his arms and was kissing him.

Daniel came out of the kiss slowly, eyelids fluttering, dazed and a little sad as he opened his eyes. "What brought that on?"

"I just don't like thinking of there being a universe where we haven't met either." O'Neill stroked his hair back from his face, hooking the dark golden strands behind his ear the way he always tried to, only to see the heavy bangs fall forward again, the way they always did. He knew there was a security camera watching them somewhere but this wasn't their universe and he didn't care about what people from a different dimension saw or thought of them. "I love you more than I have ever loved anyone or any thing in the world and if I ever lost you I would swallow my gun the same day."

Daniel looked at him in horror and then pushed him away. "Don't say that, Jack."

"Why not? It's the truth."

"Because true love ought to make you want to love life so much you don't ever want to give it up."

"Does it say that on the can or something?"

Daniel moistened his lips again, shock and humor warring for his attention. "Yes, actually it does. Right before the list of ingredients."

O'Neill moved in closer again, not touching him this time, just bending his head so Daniel could feel the warmth of his mouth against his lips. "What ingredients would those be?"

There was that look of helpless adoration from those bluer-than-blue eyes, the one that turned his knees to water, his heart to hopeless mush, his blood to the greatest brandy ever sipped beside a warm winter fire. Daniel said faintly, "I seem to remember an 'O'Neill' somewhere in the mix."

"Funny," O'Neill brushed his lips very gently across the younger man's. "I swear on the can I opened, I only remember a Daniel Jackson…."

***

It had taken days of back-breaking work cutting down palm trees with stone axes, making ropes from lianas and binding the stripped trunks together to make a raft that would have done Crusoe proud. Although neither of them had ever built a boat before, O'Neill had a bone-deep practicality that had always left him able to construct tree-houses, go-karts – his sisters had regretted the loss of their doll prams it was true, but he had let them have the occasional go in the kart to make amends – and sleds, with pretty much any materials that came to hand. Daniel was not a naturally practical person, but he had a lot of book-learning about different native crafts and as an archaeologist he was extremely dexterous. If O'Neill could chop down a tree faster, Daniel could twist rope with a speed and efficiency O'Neill could only admire. Wishing vainly for oil drums for better buoyancy, O'Neill hoped the palm trees would turn out to be as light as the balsa wood in which Thor Heyerdahl had apparently crossed the sea from South America to Polynesia, a feat Daniel had told him about rather too often for his taste. He'd insisted they made the raft big, twelve feet by eighteen with a mast in the center. Daniel had told him size wasn't everything and O'Neill had said 'Oh no…?' with a brief break to dispute the point. 

Afterwards, as they washed off the sand, they continued the discussion in between kisses. Daniel was all for them constructing a 'wa'a kaulua', something that sounded more like a cocktail than a mode of transportation to O'Neill but which Daniel insisted was a double-hulled canoe, saying it would be more light and flexible in the water than the raft, which was, in any case, reaching the size of a small country and please could they stop adding to it now? O'Neill had pointed out that even though the raft seemed huge on the beach, that still only left six feet from the mast and whoever might be sitting underneath it to the sea. 

When Daniel said 'So…?' with that cute little frown putting a dent between his eyebrows, O'Neill kissed the end of his nose and said that in this case Daniel had to realize that sea equaled sharks and he was afraid they might also realize how damned edible Daniel was. Daniel gave him a totally goopy look then, all sweet and embarrassed because O'Neill had kissed him and paid him a compliment. He got more hot and bothered with flirting than he did with sex. O'Neill wanting to have sex with him clearly didn't seem that odd to Daniel. Just something macho men did when there was no women around, presumably, especially macho men who were imminently going to die if they couldn't get away from the shadow of the volcano. It blotted out the fear and fried the pleasure circuits for a few minutes for both of them. But O'Neill kissing him on the nose, or kissing his eyelids, or putting his arms around him and nuzzling into his hair, that turned the same athletic bronzed confident guy who had earlier been eagerly wrapping his impossibly long legs around O'Neill on the beach and pretty much vacuuming O'Neill's lungs out of his chest, into a shy, clumsy schoolkid being asked out on his first date. He would sit next to O'Neill on the sand shooting him sideways looks from under his eyelashes that O'Neill wasn't meant to see, trying to work him out and coming away baffled every time. 

O'Neill had spelled it out for him in those all-important three little words, and he knew Daniel believed him. Daniel knew that he loved him. He'd known that for years. They loved one another the way family members did, there hadn't been doubts for a long time about what it would do to the other if one of them died. And now Daniel knew he desired him too. O'Neill had certainly given ample demonstration of just how desirable he found him in the way he couldn't go longer than a couple of hours without having to kiss him or touch him or much, much more. But he thought the anthropologist in Daniel might have been having too much input into the debate currently going on in Daniel's over-active mind. Probably telling him it was a warrior thing, or an all-male society thing, or a temporary thing, what men did when they were stranded somewhere and there was this much love and trust between them, a make do and mend mentality for those women-free days. It was a little difficult to prove you really wanted to make a commitment when for all you knew you were going to spend the rest of your lives on a world where there wasn't another human soul. It probably didn't carry quite the same conviction when you told the love of your life he was the only guy for you when the only serious competition around came from the monkeys.

Thinking of the monkeys, O'Neill really wished Daniel would stop worrying about them. It was true that that small troupe of golden-furred long tailed black-faced creatures were pretty endearing. After years of only having one another to interact with and observe, O'Neill and Daniel were clearly the monkeys' idea of the best show in town, and O'Neill was hardly even inhibited now by the way they always seemed to have a furry voyeur watching them every time they got sweaty and excitable together. Some of the babies were fearless and one had taken half a banana-type thing out of Daniel's hand only a few days before. O'Neill had watched Daniel gazing at the baby monkey the way women looked at kittens and said, "No."

Daniel looked at the baby monkey, looked at the grumbling volcano then looked back at Jack with that wistful, begging expression on his face that had always turned O'Neill to mush, even from the days back on Abydos. "Daniel, be practical," he begged, barely stopping himself from making the sign of the cross to ward off the big blue eyes. "If we take any monkeys on the raft with us, quite apart from the fact they would drown when the first wave came along, we would end up eating them, or the sharks would end up eating them. They have to take their chance here. They survived before when the thing blew. They'll survive again."

Daniel was still gazing at the monkey, smiling because it was cute, but with his eyes full of sorrow because it was probably going to die soon. He dabbled his fingers in the sand and the baby rushed him, touching his fingers and then running away whooping with a mixture of triumph and fear. 

"Don't get fond of them," O'Neill ordered.

"Okay," Daniel said but he was still watching the baby and when it rushed him the second time, it grabbed at his t-shirt and held on then gave him a gentle love-bite on the neck before rushing away again.

"Daniel…" O'Neill begged.

Daniel looked at him reproachfully. "They could be the last of a species that has died out everywhere else on this world."

O'Neill threw up his hands. "Daniel, I am trying to save our lives here! Neither of us is a sailor and the swell out there is pretty damned scary. Not to mention the sharks."

At the mention of 'sharks' Daniel got that faraway look in his eyes again and O'Neill sighed in defeat. The trouble with Daniel having missed out on so much popular culture was that he sometimes came at things from entirely the wrong angle. While O'Neill was hearing John Carpenter music and seeing body parts washed up on the beach, Daniel was remembering the tale of Ducky-Wacko or whatever he was called, the Fijian sea god. 

"Just because they're carnivores doesn't mean they're going to eat us. Dogs are carnivores. We're carnivores. Well, omnivores through evolution but in the days of us being hunter-gatherers we would have been classified as carnivores – "

"Sharks are bad and they eat you, and that's all you need to know about them, except what they look like so you can hit them with an oar." 

"Actually, in ancient Hawaiian folklore, some shark gods were worshipped as protectors of a certain district. Like Ka'ahupahau and Kahiuka, who were a sister and brother who were born human but later transformed into sharks. They lived in a cave at the entrance to Pearl Harbor and watched over the people of Ewa, guarding and protecting them from man-eating sharks. The man-eating sharks tried to blame her for their own crimes but without success. Haven't you ever heard the proverb 'Ha'ahewa no niuhi ia Ka'ahupahau'?" 

O'Neill rolled his eyes at him in disbelief. "Yeah, we say that all the time in Minnesota. It's right up there with 'Everything tastes better with cheese'."

Daniel gave him one of this best martyred sighs. "It means 'the man-eating sharks blamed Ka'ahupahau', meaning, evil-doers blame the person who safeguards the rights of others."

"And that's relevant to us not ending up dinner for a Great White how exactly?"

Daniel was saved having to answer by the baby monkey finishing its half a banana thing and coming sneaking back to grab the second half. For a few seconds, Daniel and the monkey wrestled for it and then Daniel let the fruit go and the baby grabbed it triumphantly, going whooping up the beach to show its prize to its less courageous older brothers and sisters. Daniel watched it go, looking stricken. 

"We can't take them with us." O'Neill used his full-bird colonel voice. "And that's final." He felt victorious for about two seconds as he saw Daniel take in that he was not going to be budged on this so there was no point in arguing with him, then when he saw the defeated slump of Daniel's shoulders felt like a bully and a heel. He reached out and stroked his hair helplessly. "I'm scared enough about trying to keep you alive."

Daniel reached out and touched his face. "I know. I'm sorry. I just wish…" O'Neill kissed him and he melted into the kiss, rubbing his face against the man's stubble, seeming to like the beard the man was half-heartedly growing despite still taking the time to shave each morning himself. O'Neill kissed him again, deeper this time, and then Daniel was on his back on the beach and he was kissing him over and over, fierce and tender at the same time, stealing another few breathless moments back from their fear, time just for them and nothing and no one else. He was only slightly distracted by the baby monkey coming back to pelt him with torn up bits of banana-type-fruit skin from a nearby palm tree in what was a clear sign of disapproval. O'Neill looked up at the furry creature in between pants as he hastily unbuttoned himself and said, "Everyone's a critic." Daniel pulled him back down into another kiss, which was so groin-stirringly hungry it more than made up for the mild sting of bits of peel being hurled at his bare ass. All the same he did think it was ironic that even here, on the other side of the galaxy, with no humans here except themselves, there were still sentient beings around who thought Daniel was way too good for him and O'Neill should go play with himself instead.

 

O'Neill was haunted by the thought of those sharks he'd seen following the tuna, and thinking of Daniel's lack of coordination, imagined him just slipping over the side one night while O'Neill was asleep and being snatched up by eager jaws before O'Neill had a chance to help him. He'd woken up streaming sweat after a particularly vivid nightmare, and even though it had been in the starlit hours of morning, he'd gone out onto the beach and started building a crow's nest construction around the mast. Something they could lash themselves to when tired so they couldn't slip over the sides. As the days passed and the volcano still didn't erupt, that had grown into rigging effect with a roof on it to shelter them from the sun, and the two rough-hewn oars had become smooth and perfectly shaped with sanded handles without a splinter in sight, then notches carved into them and liana bound around it for a better grip. He used the woven walls of the temporary cabin to a roof for the shelter on the raft, insisting that it was important they kept the sun off themselves. Daniel had helped him build it. They worked together surprisingly well. Daniel didn't always have the sense to move out of the way of a tree that was about to brain him, but he was enough of an anthropologist to be good at the fiddly bits O'Neill didn't have the patience for. He was the one who'd ground out the rowlocks and the worked out the locking system that held them in place, lashed in tight between two of the raft logs.

They had built the ramp from which it would be launched, ready to roll into the tide. Daniel had regretted the mess they'd made, all those felled trees, mankind doing what it always did to untouched wildernesses. O'Neill had found the stumps just as ugly, but had told Daniel roughly that they were all going to burn away so what difference did it make? Daniel had looked at the monkeys again, watching them from the trees they had been careful not to cut down. O'Neill had said again, "We can't take them with us."

Daniel said, "I know."

But when O'Neill came back from emptying the fish trap he found two of the younger ones taking fruit from Daniel's hand again, a baby climbing up his back using tiny fistfuls of t-shirt, before tugging curiously at his hair. Their mother watched over them from a branch. She was the most nervous, the only one who hadn't yet taken fruit from Daniel's hand. Today O'Neill noticed her belly was bulging. She must be pregnant again. He thought of the lava setting the trees on fire, the monkeys screaming as they burned, and yelled at Daniel to stop fuckin' feeding them, they weren't pets. They had their own lives.

Daniel just looked him and gave the baby a piece of fruit. He had his stubborn expression on. He said, "It's just in case."

"Just in case…what?"

"There was a way to evacuate them. It would be easier to do if they were tame."

O'Neill snatched the fruit out of Daniel's hand and hurled it back into the jungle, the monkeys scampering after it, shrieking at one another as they did so. Only the baby stayed, hanging around Daniel's neck, sucking its thumb pensively as it looked at O'Neill. He sighed. "There is no way to evacuate them. They have to take their chance here." 

Daniel didn't answer him, he just gave the baby another piece of fruit. O'Neill swore and made a fire, then cooked the fish in silence, knowing all the time he did it that Daniel was still resisting a reality he had already accepted. When this place went up nothing else landbound was going to make it, and all they could do was try to save themselves.

A part of him still hoped they might never have to use the raft at all, that it would become their equivalent of those boats guys kept in their yard in landlocked areas, that they spent every weekend sanding and varnishing but never actually got wet. But the volcano seemed angrier with each passing day and the local troupe of monkeys had taken to staying close to the beach now, a tight-knit family group of them who followed Daniel wherever he went, albeit from a safe distance, as if they knew he was their only hope of rescue when the explosion came.

***

O'Neill though that seeing the way Jacob hugged his daughter was another pointer to how shaken up everyone was by the loss of Doc and Colonel Green-Eyed Monster. He knew the Jacob in his universe wasn't given to displays of public affection and by the look on surprise on Major Carter's face, he figured it was the same here. That kiss he dropped into her hair wasn't meant to be seen by anyone else. Or that squeeze of her hand as he interlaced his fingers with hers. He'd been assuming the Carter in his dimension was a lot closer to her father than the Carter in this one, with them both being Tok'ra, whereas this one was only an ex-Tok'ra, but no, there was the same feeling of connection between them. That familial closeness that almost nothing else could match. What his Daniel had lost. He turned to see Daniel smiling at Jacob and Carter, happy because he knew how happy the Carter he knew would be at some affirmation that her father loved her. There was never any longing in his eyes when he watched them together, no hint of envy, he was just always so pleased for Carter. Impulsively O'Neill put an arm around his shoulders and hugged him close.

Daniel looked up at him in surprise, saying softly, "What?"

"Nothing." O'Neill saw that half-smile cross Daniel's face, pleased but a little bewildered. "You're just very sweet."

Daniel dropped his gaze at once, embarrassed and pleased, deepening his voice the way he always did when he was trying to disguise how touched he was. "You're getting sappy in your old age, Jack."

O'Neill watched Jacob slap Teal'c on the shoulder in greeting, like an uncle with a nephew of whom he was particularly proud. His nod to O'Neill was guarded. "Colonel, good to see you again."

"You too, General."

Jacob's frowned as he looked at Daniel. "Doctor Jackson, I presume?"

Daniel held out a hand. "Pleased to meet you, sir."

"Good of you to help us look for our…lost lambs."

Daniel's smile was a little brittle, his eyes a little sorrowful, but nothing could have been straighter than his spine as he said softly, "Any friend of Jack's is a friend of mine."

Jacob darted a quick look at O'Neill, one that clearly demanded to know if this Daniel had been told about his relationship with the other one. O'Neill barely resisted the urge to roll his eyes at him and glower, instead giving a tight little nod of confirmation, but he was getting a little sick of being treated like the Marquis de Sade. Yes, he'd had sex with the Daniel from this dimension. At the time he hadn't thought it was any big deal. He had sex with people all the time as long as they were young and attractive, and Daniel was both of those things. He seduced a lot of people, they had all, without exception, enjoyed being seduced. He had done nice things to them in bed and they had liked it. Where was the crime? Except he knew what the crime was, it was because the person he had seduced was Daniel, and that was something you just weren't allowed to do unless you were planning to spend the rest of your life with him. Daniel was too emotionally vulnerable, too brilliant, too injured by life, too innocent, too trusting, too willing to think the best of everyone…basically just too darned _special_ for someone as bargain basement and ordinary as himself yadda yadda…. They hadn't actually put it in those words but it had been made clear to him in sighs and looks of disapproval and half-swallowed reproaches that this was the case. Dumping Daniel, of course, just put him entirely beyond the pale. If he'd been in some regiment in Victorian India they would have been handing him the revolver and telling him to go outside and do the decent thing by now. Cheating at cards would have been as nothing beside it.

Sighing wearily he followed the others onto the tel'tak. It was another heap of junk the Tok'ra seemed to be holding together with bits of baling twine and crossed fingers, showing that some things didn't change whichever dimension you happened to be in. He'd visited a lot of universes when on that 'inter-dimensional initiative' for which at the time he had won so much praise, and in every one the Tok'ra had been making do with geriatric equipment running on re-bored crystals and hope. As he took his place in the main deck, thinking how much he hated this gold Goa'uld glyph motif they were all decorated with, it occurred to him that he probably wasn't the only one doing some soul-searching. Hammond hadn't minded him fucking someone else's archaeologist when he'd been having an affair with that other Daniel. Kawalsky had been doing enough nudging and winking to ensure that only the blind or deaf could have missed the real reason why the other dimension's 'cultural expert' was so happy to cross space and time to exchange ideas with their O'Neill. Back in those days all he'd ever got from Hammond in the way of reproach over his sex-life had been the odd shake of the head, but even that had been indulgent, a hint of pride at his track list of seductions behind the surface disapproval. It was only when the Daniel Hammond knew had fallen under O'Neill's spell that the rockets had been launched. He supposed it was an inter-dimensional variant of the same hypocrisy that made men proud if their sons could seduce other men's daughters but ready to kill the sons of other men who approached their own girls with dishonorable intent. He certainly had every intention of killing, gutting, and possibly cooking and eating any guy with a track record as shabby as his own who attempted to pay his respects to Katy in the future. There were times when double standards shouldn't just be tolerated but possibly embraced.

"You okay, Jack?"

He turned to find Daniel proffering a cup of something that smelled more enticing than it looked.

He nodded, taking it gratefully. "Yes. You okay?"

Daniel looked at him in surprise. "Do you mean the Tollan thing? It seems to be working fine." 

"You okay with the whole…" There was a look in Daniel's eyes that told him not to go there and he backed off at the last minute, waving a hand to encompass the gold-paneled gloom of the tel'tak. "You know…Dimension-crossing thing."

Daniel sat down on one of the uncomfortable bed-type things the Tok'ra seemed to think were good enough for long journeys although they really weren't. "If I don't think about it too much."

O'Neill nodded. "Yeah, me too. All those possibilities."

"All those different versions of us playing out every different fork in the road we ever came to." Daniel screwed up his face. "It ought to be reassuring, and I suppose on one level it is, but on another level it's…"

"A fast track to a padded cell if you think about it too much?"

Nodding, Daniel absently took the drink from O'Neill's hand and sipped at it. "All those variants of us."

Carter looked around at the 'padded cell' reference, a clouded look in her eyes he couldn't quite categorize, but at that last comment from Daniel she blinked in surprise before turning away again. O'Neill felt suddenly empty with the realization that although in his world, he and Daniel were the originals, and all the others the copies, to these people, he and Daniel were just pale carbons of the ones they knew. He felt homesick for his own dimension abruptly and looped his arm through Daniel's without thinking about it. It occurred to him that when he'd found the proof of all those dead doppelgangers in the dimension where he'd first met the other Daniel, he hadn't thought of them as real, not thought of there being people waiting at home for them. A part of him had thought they'd known that they were somehow counterfeit, their lives less vivid and less valid than his own. Now, he realized it really didn't work like that. If he and Daniel died in this world, others here would shrug at the loss of them as long as their own versions were safe. He realized too there was a good reason why people should remain in their own dimension, so they never had to confront the proof of their own insignificance unless they were unwise enough to constantly gaze at the stars.

He felt very vulnerable all of a sudden. He knew it was irrational, probably the result of his own guilty conscience about the many in the past whom he had loved and left without even the benefits of emotional alimony, but it seemed too much like life to him that just as he had found someone to whom he wanted only to be faithful, that the one he loved should be taken from him. No doubt Daniel could have quoted models from Greek drama at him, blinded patricides whose children were doomed from birth, and reluctant matricides pursued by Furies, all proof that one's destiny could never truly be sidestepped, that one's sins would always have to paid for, but even without the benefits of a classical education he had learned to be suspicious of the way the world unraveled in its supposedly artless chaos. Impossible not to look for patterns in the universe even long after one had rejected a world order ruled by any god. He still wondered if there was some cosmic rule out there that stated there could only be one version of each person alive in any given universe at the same time for a reason, and that it couldn't be circumvented by any technology, even something really clever dreamed up by the Tollan. In some part of his mind, illogical though he knew it was, he was already starting to believe that the price which would end up being paid to bring the other Jack and Daniel home safely would be the lives of this Jack and Daniel. Looking at the young man next to him, blue eyes quizzical as they gazed at O'Neill with compassion and concern, he knew that fond as he was of the Daniel who had been lost, that was a price he really didn't want to have to pay.

***

O'Neill had got into the habit of thinking that their lives ended with the launching of the raft. He'd looked at the swell beyond the rocks and the waves were enormous there, great white tipped breakers like sheets of blue-green glass, and there were also those dark dorsal fins cutting a line through the water. He looked around the island and his heart lurched when he thought of leaving it. The dark wet tangle of the jungle, all those brilliant splashes of primary colors amongst the greenness: birds and flowers, and butterflies and snakes. This has been their home and a part of him had fallen in love with it. This place had given Daniel back to him, given them food and shelter and the space and time they needed to realize they were more than friends now. The mind-meltingly good sex had been another gift very gratefully received. Now he couldn't watch a lizard basking on a stone without wondering if it was going to be one of the ones to die in the coming inferno. The birds were leaving and that had given them both hope they must have somewhere to go, but birds could fly thousands of miles while he doubted he and Daniel could row that far on their homemade raft, not when neither of them were sailors. 

Daniel kept reminding him about the Vikings possibly reaching North America, the South Americans reaching Polynesia, all those great journeys undertaken and achieved by past civilizations but it didn't really mean squat to him right now. Not when all his instincts were telling him that if they got on that raft they were never going to make it, and the rumbling volcano was telling him that if they didn't get on the raft they were dead. There was also the little detail that Daniel was so obviously telling him about all these great voyages of the past to make him feel better, not because he believed they were going to survive. Daniel had taken to looking at him with longing, to wrapping his arms around him when they slept at night, touching his hair, pressing against O'Neill's back or chest and inhaling the scent of him. If he had ever doubted it before at least he knew now that Daniel loved him, because the look in Daniel's blue eyes these days was the expression of someone who was afraid he was going to lose someone he loved and would rather die than see that happen.

He knew what that expression looked like so well, because he felt the same way. He was looking at Daniel now and all he was thinking about was how curious and kind and maddening and smart and beautiful and unique he was, how much he loved him and how if he lost him he wouldn't want to go on living.

Daniel was asleep in the cabin so he was free to look at him at leisure and had pushed open the hanging curtain of the doorway to do it better. The light carried with it the smell and sounds of the sea, a faint salt spray, a fainter dusting of sand. Daniel was lying on his back on their bed, naked, one leg a little drawn up, long dark eyelashes a thick feathering on his cheek, mouth slightly open, lower lip shining with moisture as he licked his lips in his sleep. The illness had left him thinner and finer, waist more slender than ever, but the days of working on the boat since had built up his muscle tone again in his forearms, and the fresh air and sunshine had banished his sickbed pallor and the shadows under his eyes, putting golden highlights in his hair and leaving him lightly tanned all over. He looked more appetizing than a happy meal to a starving man, but O'Neill did have to admit to a certain relief that whatever Daniel might look like lying out here naked, the man did have several PhDs and an IQ that went off the scale. Otherwise it tended to make O'Neill appear a little shallow, given that he was now dating someone in earnest who was younger than him, blonder than him, and such a total…babe.

He knelt to examine the scar tissue again, to see for himself that everything had healed. There was a shiny patch of skin on Daniel's right thigh, which he stroked gently. Then there was his appendix scar, a pale pink caterpillar on his golden skin. The wound to his hip had hardly left a mark, he had to look for that one, but the wound on his left shoulder was unmistakable, a little jagged from the uneven stitches, a pucker of pink scar tissue left when the projectile had punched its way into his flesh. He kissed that wound gently, letting his tongue stray across the tiny ridges of healed skin. Daniel stirred, murmuring something incomprehensible in his sleep. He still dreamed in the language of his dead wife. It should have made O'Neill feel excluded but it moved him in a way he couldn't articulate. Because he knew how that felt too, to lose the one woman you loved with all your heart, with no defenses, no reservations. You'd had them once and thought you'd be together forever, but now they were gone and your heart would always ache for them. What kind of a man would one be if it didn't? 

"Sha're…?" Daniel jolted awake, reaching for someone who was gone. His hand touched O'Neill's arm and his eyes opened in shock.

O'Neill swallowed. "She's gone, Daniel."

Daniel blinked at him in confusion for a moment as he awakened then leaned forward to kiss him very gently on the lips, as if to make certain he was real. He stroked those long sensitive fingers down O'Neill's face, gazing into his eyes as he did so. "But you're here...?"

O'Neill smiled gently. "I'm definitely here."

As he was pulled down into a kiss O'Neill offered exactly the amount of resistance air offers to a dropped anvil. They kissed passionately and tenderly, tongues intertwining, exchanging saliva and whispers and the salty metallic flavor of themselves. As O'Neill pulled back he saw the heat rise in Daniel's eyes that he was feeling in his veins, a reflected flame, and then he was bending to mouth his neck, then lick his chest, his nipples, the faintly salt-flavored taste of his skin, so smooth and warm against his lips and tongue, his body a familiar wonder because its perfection always surpassed his memories of it. He licked lines across his belly, glistening snail trails of desire, avoiding the waking interest of his loins for the moment. Instead he kissed the inside of his thighs, that impossible softness of that skin, then the faint dusting of fair hairs upon his legs, the taut muscle of his calves, the bone of his ankles, the vulnerability of his toes. He felt Daniel tense and flex underneath him in response, every sinew rippling to the touch of O'Neill's tongue, and needed to be on top of him then, feeling skin against skin, heat against heat, want against need. Snatching up the shell of coconut milk Daniel kept beside the bed in case of night thirst, he splashed some of the sweet whiteness into the hollow of his hand, then reached between them to stroke Daniel's cock with it, the limp weight of it abruptly straining to eagerness, a pulsing column rising from the soft fuzz of hair at his loins. Even that hair was several shades lighter than O'Neill remembered it from their first kiss on the beach. 

"Oh Jeez." He bent to drop featherlight kisses across the taut belly, up an imaginary line between the curve of his ribs to the hollow of his breast bone.

"What's wrong?" Daniel's voice was deeper with lust, a snatched intake of breath making his broad chest rise and fall quickly.

"I'm dating a blond." O'Neill closed his teeth on one rosy nipple, making Daniel gasp before he could voice an objection. Through an erect nub he murmured, "And you're younger than I am. That means I'm shallow _and_ a cradlesnatcher." 

"What does that make me?" Daniel returned.

"Probably a bit of an airhead. Being a blond and all."

"I'm not a blond!"

O'Neill straddled him, bending down to brush his mouth across Daniel's moist parted lips. He slicked his erection with a coconut milk wetted hand, making him gasp. "The evidence is against you." He stroked his own cock as he slipped his tongue into Daniel's open mouth and felt Daniel's fingers gently moving his aside before wrapping themselves around his member and beginning to bring it to hardness with quick sure strokes. O'Neill broke the kiss to grab air, skin beginning to prickle with new heat radiating from his wakening cock. "Think you're better at this than I am these days, do you?"

Daniel licked his lips provocatively. "Yes."

"You think you know better than thirty years of skilled practice?"

Daniel pumped his now hard cock, the coconut milk dripping over both of them. "I think I leave your thirty years of skilled practice for dead."

O'Neill swallowed hard as his member swelled eagerly in Daniel's hands. "He seems to agree with you." 

He cupped the back of Daniel's head with his hand and pulled him in for a deeper kiss, their tongues intertwining again, comfortable with one another as old friends. His desire quickened at once and he kissed Daniel again, deep and slow, then tantalized his mouth with his lips, his tongue, the softest caress of his mouth before plunging in for another deep kiss. As Daniel made to reach for him he splashed the cold coconut milk across his body, making Daniel gasp with the shock of it, then, with a slow look at the supine man that let him see all the heat in his blood, O'Neill bent his head and began to lick off the milk. Daniel jerked against him and their cocks touched burnished lengths, sensitive heads brushing against one another. O'Neill moved his hips in a slow forward glide and their scrotums jostled, slippery with spilt milk, nestling against one another like a new and much more interesting form of geometry. Daniel closed his eyes, luxuriating in the sensations. As O'Neill licked one nipple clean of sticky sweetness, he had a sudden memory of himself in kindergarten trying to get the square pegs to fit into the round holes and hitting them disconsolately with the wooden mallet when they wouldn't cooperate. He snorted with laughter and Daniel opened his eyes in surprise. 

"What?"

O'Neill grinned and licked him again, a sweep of the tongue across his abdomen. "You have every reason to be grateful to my kindergarten teacher."

Daniel gave him an under the eyelashes look, suspecting he was being teased. "Why?"

"She was the one who took my hammer away. Told me to work it out logically instead."

"What were you trying to learn?"

O'Neill licked him again, rubbing his stubble against Daniel's stomach to make him squirm and jolt against him, the way he always did, like a kid being tickled, although there was nothing remotely childlike about that jutting erection that stabbed O'Neill in the chest. "The way things fit together." He gave Daniel a filthy leer, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

Daniel giggled. There was no other word for it. Looking so sweet and so young and so endearingly silly that O'Neill found himself looking at him with a kind of wonder, smiling because he looked so happy, but with a kind of catch in his heart too. He said gently, "I do love you, you know."

Daniel's mouth gave an embarrassed little twitch that was almost but not quite a smile. He'd looked like that when O'Neill told him that he believed in him, after Sha're's death when Daniel had been so wounded and difficult and in need of affirmation, then when the affirmation had come he'd looked as if he thought there must be a catch somewhere and, as he realized there wasn't, had been so extraordinarily touched by it. "I know."

O'Neill studied him for a moment. "Do you?"

"Yes." Daniel looked up at him quickly, trying to appear positive. But he was discomfited by the change of mood, happier wading in the shallows of their erogenous zones.

O'Neill bent and brushed his lips gently with his. "You really truly deeply madly know I love you?"

"Yes." 

"For now and always and ever and ever?"

"Jack…" Daniel flashed him a quick look of protest. 

"What, I'm not allowed to get mushy now?"

Daniel looked up at him from under his eyelashes. "You'll just wish you hadn't said it later."

"Because I'm such an unevolved troglodyte?"

"No. Just because you're…you."

O'Neill kissed him again. "You're a very strange man, Doctor Jackson. You'll let me do all kinds of illicit and possibly illegal things to your naked body but if I start trying to tell you how I feel about you, you get all hot and bothered and embarrassed."

"You're the one who said life isn't a chick flick."

"I was having an unevolved moment." O'Neill gazed into Daniel's eyes. "Do you love me?"

"Yes!" It came out exasperated and almost resentful. Then as O'Neill continued to gaze at him, the irritation vanished from Daniel's eyes to leave only the helpless longing. "Yes." That one was soft and wistful. "You know I do. When have you ever not known?"

Too many times to count when Daniel was pissed with him or yelling at him or going off with strange women or other men with his face. But he didn't say any of that now. Not least because none of that mattered now. O'Neill thought of all the times they'd fought and all the times they'd felt their hearts turn over as they thought the other one was hurt or lost or dead. All the times they'd been there for one another. "You know for a smart guy you're pretty dumb sometimes," he observed conversationally. "How could _you_ ever not have known I love you? Look at all the crap I've taken from you over the years. Look at all the really idiotic things you've dragged me into because I couldn't say 'no' to you. Look at all the times you gave me gray hairs –"

"Oh, so I'm to blame for the gray hairs now?"

"You were always to blame for the gray hairs. How many did I have when I met you, do you remember? No? I'll tell you: none. As in zip, zilch, squat, zero. By the time I'd known you for three years the brown hair was just a distant memory."

Daniel rolled his eyes. "I can't believe you're blaming me for the gray hair! Did I ever get myself stuck on a sub that was about to be blown up?"

"Did I ever let a fish-guy vacuum the contents of my brain?"

"Did I ever get an alien language downloaded into _my_ brain?"

"Did I ever end up invisible and out of phase?"

"Did I ever get myself trapped on a world with a broken Stargate…?" Daniel looked around the cabin and wrinkled his nose. "Okay, don't answer that one."

"Hah!" O'Neill kissed him again, hard. "Got you there, Jackson. You can never throw Eudora at me again."

Daniel kissed him back, long fingers furrowing through his hair, tongue wrapped around his in a tonsil-bruising, breath-taking, heart-stopping kiss to end all debate and all doubt. O'Neill felt the sticky heat of Daniel's body against his, the thump of the younger man's heart, the eager jut of his loins. He moved his hips and their cocks stuttered against one another, another push and they were parallel as passing trains just scraping the paint from their carriage doors, and then at last they found their now-familiar rhythm, flesh colliding in a burning friction that built from the balls up, arrowpoints of pleasure, lightning jolts to the groin, faster, harder, Daniel pulling him in to a deeper kiss, a stumble in their rhythm, a bruising collision of testicles that made him yelp. Daniel snickering into his open mouth. O'Neill kissing him hard in punishment, reaching down to get them back on course then taking his weight on his arms, wondering why Daniel always bagged the easy position, then remembering before he protested that he liked it this way, Daniel there looking up at him in that 'take me, I'm yours' manner. A quickening of desire just at the thought of it, a long slow push, almost too hard, making Daniel wince, mouth open, sweat trickle, eyes glaze at the thought of being entered, what he always thought about when they did this. O'Neill seeing the flicker of it in Daniel's blue eyes and an answering flicker in his own at the thought. Sometimes denial was hotter than the act itself. Both of them knowing what they wanted and not doing it but sharing the thought all the same. Daniel licked his lips deliberately, pupils expanded until his eyes were dark with desire. Nothing turned him on faster than the thought that Daniel trusted him that much, desired him so completely, needed him like breathing. Nothing seemed to turn Daniel on faster than the realization that he was wanted, could inspire that kind of desire yet could be loved enough that the one who wanted him would still deny himself. Not that O'Neill had been denying himself or Daniel anything very much recently but right now it felt like the right thing to do… Another slow hard push, their cocks slippery with coconut milk, heated with lust. Then quicker, shallow, cock sliding against cock, perfect friction, hips moving faster, faster, starting to sweat, to pant, to grunt in his case, to moan in Daniel's, their own passion exciting them, whispering hotly in Daniel's ear, kissing the side of his face, eager, hungry, kissing and licking at ear, cheekbone, jaw, throat. Bite. 

"Yes…!"

Pleasure ripped from him. He came explosively and at the hot splash of O'Neill's come on his belly, Daniel convulsed underneath him, the movement jolting the bite into something deeper. Daniel gave a strangled cry that had nothing to do with pain and O'Neill felt him shudder and tremble under him, Daniel's warm semen spurting across his cock in a way that made it eager all over again. He opened his mouth, easing his teeth out of the soft skin of Daniel's throat and winced an apology as he tasted the blood on his tongue. Daniel was looking at him open-mouthed. "You vampire," he panted breathlessly, putting a hand up to his bleeding neck.

"You liked it," O'Neill returned accusingly.

Daniel wrinkled his nose again, looking off into the distance in the way he did when dissembling. "Maybe I did, maybe I didn't."

"You came like an avalanche!"

"You lie like a rug."

Fingers tightened on his arms and Daniel demonstrated his new muscle tone with a deft move O'Neill and Teal'c had tried and failed for years to teach him in the gym. Lying flat on his back with Daniel on top of him looking much too pleased with himself, O'Neill narrowed his eyes. "Oh great, now there's only me around to use it on, you finally learn some self defense."

"You bit me." Daniel looked down at him, a thin trickle of blood running down his neck, then moistened his mouth in a slow tantalizing flick of tongue gliding across lips. "You're a bad, bad man."

O'Neill growled as his cock twitched in response to that tongue tease, and abruptly flipped Daniel back over onto his back, straddling him purposefully. "Want me to show you how bad?"

"Want to show me you can?" Daniel darted a skeptical look between O'Neill's legs and at the breathtaking cheek of it, O'Neill felt his limp groin give another indignant twitch.

"I don't take any longer to get it up again than you do."

"Yes, you do."

"No, I don't." Another kiss for punctuation.

"You do too." Blatant passive-aggressive eyelash batting while lying around looking naked and delectable and thinking himself safe from all punishment.

O'Neill kissed him. Soundly. Daniel responded by returning his kiss with lung-sucking enthusiasm while wrapping his arms around O'Neill's neck, his legs around his body, and rubbing his groin vigorously against O'Neill's. O'Neill felt his higher brain functions retreat, his body go into an ecstatic spasm, every skin cell reveling in feeling the silky heat of Daniel's coconut-milk scented body rubbing against his, and then he was abruptly flipped over to his back again and Daniel was giving him a last teasing kiss, a flicker of tongue tip slipped between his lips, before springing to his feet with the kind of muscular athleticism that would have done credit to a man raised by apes in the jungle. 

As O'Neill gaped at him from an untidy sprawl on the bed, legs akimbo, cock at half mast, panting for the breath Daniel had stolen from him, Daniel gave him a come-hither look over his shoulder that should have been illegal everywhere and then said softly, "Catch me if you can, Jack." Then he was gone. Out of the open cabin doorway, down the steps and onto the beach. Then running with sure swift paces, feet kicking little spits of sand from the beach with each loping stride, golden body gleaming in the sunlight.

O'Neill was up and running after him before he'd even thought about it, barely noticing the twinge of his knees as he took the stairs in one bound. Some things were more important even than cartilage. 

The brilliance of the day was an assault upon the senses, the unbearable blueness of the sky, the dazzling brightness of the sunlight, gulls swooped and his balance swooped with them. Far away to his right on the edge of the horizon line where the sea met the sky in a smudge of torn cloud a geyser gusted into the air and he thought for a moment it was a steamer. Then a giant fin flipped after a hump of wet grayness and he knew it was a whale. He was torn between regret and wonder, the loneliness acute after that second when he had swung between two possibilities, the thought of seeing other human beings again as welcome as it was intrusive, wanting not to be alone if any harm befell either of them again, wanting this idyll of theirs to stay exactly as it was. On the other hand he'd just seen a whale. To his left the jungle climbed up the sides of the volcano like a thousand mountaineers in camo gear, glossy, green and weary and ultimately defeated. He wondered if the trees could feel the earth beginning to heat beneath their roots. If in the way that flightless birds might imagine how it would be to have working wings again, giant redwoods ever wondered how it felt to dance upon the wind like spinning leaves in fall.

Daniel was darting ahead of him, the soles of his bare feet pink against his new tan. He'd been surprisingly sensible about wearing his boots in the jungle and his soles looked vulnerable and soft, ridiculously clean. His butt though was just poetry in motion, curvy, taut, biteably firm and moving enticingly with each long-legged stride. His butt was a come-on all by itself and O'Neill increased his pace automatically at the sight of it, not even caring that his genitals were joggling unceremoniously as he ran, just tantalized by those little glimpses he was getting of Daniel's equipment.

Daniel sprinted around the south-west corner of the lagoon, a nudist streaking onto a picture postcard, and then he veered off to his left and ducked into the jungle. O'Neill followed him. He felt he was being reduced to his most basic form, his most primal attributes, a male animal chasing its mate, deaf and blind to anything save the possibility of imminent sex. The red earth was still cool here, and where last night's rainfall lay in puddles on the ground clouds of multi-colored butterflies fluttered over the surface to drink until there was barely a ripple of the water left uncovered. The air here was still a pleasant shock to his lungs, all that decomposing matter, resinous mulch, the fragrance of open flowers, the sweet salt breeze of the sea, too rich, too clear, like the bottle of Sarkatvelo the Russians had sent to General Hammond after the SGC had helped them out with that little problem in Siberia. The incessant buzz of the insects was something he hardly noticed any more, although it was always a surprise when he stepped out onto the beach again and there was only the swish-swish of the sea, the mournful crying of the gulls.

It was tricky running barefoot through the jungle, so many gnarled roots spreading knotty tendrils under a disguise of rotting leaf mulch. The monkeys were shrieking, excited by the chase. He knew without looking up at their dark jabbering faces that they were hoping Daniel would escape him. He kind of thought the lizards were on his side though. And possibly the snake. 

Daniel was a flash of pale flesh ahead of him, a flicker of calf, a gleam of dark gold as the sun slanted through the canopy, and then he was veering off again and O'Neill knew where he was making for now and slowed his pace, catching his breath, letting Daniel sprint to the place where the sound of running water was already adding a bass-line to the insect orchestra. It was days since he'd heard a parrot call. The blue and red and green brilliance of their feathers colors stolen from the jungle that he missed. 

He wondered if he and Daniel were running from their lust or from each other or from the knowledge that they were going to have to leave here, that the sea was waiting for them and neither of them were sailors. He didn't believe their natural state was permanently horny, not when they had both accepted celibacy for so long with barely a mutter of protest. If romance had come to them back on base they would have proceeded cautiously, slow steps through dinner to formal caresses, passion between them would have come with a faint sense of embarrassment, a sense that they were too old for this kind of nonsense, not to mention that they knew one another far too well to start swinging from any chandeliers with the other one now. But they had thrown themselves into this relentless rutting like two teenagers on amyl nitrate. The Daniel Jackson who lived in his head and was careful of his heart turning into a permanently horny schoolboy always wanting to be sucked or fucked or kissed or stroked. And at forty-four he should have left this haze of permanent arousal far behind. If they ever saw reality again they'd be ashamed of themselves, and probably furtively proud as well, Daniel because he had finally thrown caution to the winds and let his body do his thinking for him, O'Neill just because he'd managed to get it up so many, many times.

As he rounded the corner and looked down into the clearing where the river dropped into a minifall and swirling pool before speeding on its way to the lagoon, his breath caught in his burning chest. Daniel was standing under the falls with the sunlight arcing through it turning the fine spray to a thousand tiny prisms, Daniel's chest heaving from the chase, throwing his head back to let the cooling water splash over him, washing the sweat from his naked skin. He turned to look at O'Neill over his shoulder and his smile was unexpectedly sweet, a little embarrassment in the blue eyes as he realized how come-hitherish he had just been. O'Neill smiled back, amused and good-humored, but aroused as well, very aware of his body, the sweat trickling down his spine, the way his loins were swinging between his legs, turned on by his own nakedness, by even the prickling of an insect alighting on his heated skin, even more aroused by Daniel's nakedness, and the fall of light and water running over him.

He thought he felt the earth stir beneath his feet, like a waking animal after a long dark sleep. No doubt Daniel would tell him this was where dragons came from: the sleeping fire of the volcano, the fossils of pterodactyls embedded in old granite, an interweaving of fact and fantasy in minds always hungry for myth. It would be the need for those myths that would interest the anthropologist in Daniel, and all the different forms the same story took in all those different tongues. From fire-breathing monsters to the possibility of some fount from which all languages might have sprung was always much too short a jump for a linguist. Carter would insist there had only ever been crocodiles and sea snakes and men with too much imagination. He wondered if she'd dissected childhood fairy tales with scientific vigor or if there had ever been a time when she just accepted the impossible: Rapunzel's hair and the spinning wheel on which Sleeping Beauty had pricked her finger, Cinderella and her lost glass slipper, the wily enterprise of Puss in Boots. Charlie had believed in dragons long after he'd stopped believing in Santa Claus. He'd have wanted to know if they were out there somewhere in one of the worlds beyond the 'gate. Although he would have admitted it to no one, O'Neill wasn't entirely sure he'd stopped believing in them either, that a part of him hadn't been secretly hoping that out there in the universe somewhere there might be the leathery winged monsters of his childhood nightmares, a place and time where he could duel with them at last and win.

Daniel was looking up at the volcano as O'Neill waded into the water and pushed through the flow towards him. The current was vigorous, tugging at him like a fractious toddler, but he ignored it and waded up behind Daniel, planting a kiss on the back of his neck. Daniel said quietly, "It's smoking."

"I know." O'Neill didn't look at it. He knew what it looked like, the trickle of smoke rising ominously from the flat top. There would be a crater up there but he'd chosen not to gaze into it. He didn't pick up guns in the SGC and stare into the barrels of them just for fun either. He wrapped his arms around Daniel and began to nuzzle at his neck in earnest. When Daniel still gazed up at the volcano, he began to work on his left ear, licking, nibbling, tugging at the lobeless edge with his teeth. Daniel closed his eyes then and leaned back into his embrace, a tacit compliance, a temporary end to resistance. O'Neill couldn't help wondering if he would have made a lot more headway with Daniel in the past when they were having some ideological disagreement if he'd known back then where all his hot spots were located. He inserted his tongue into his ear and began to flick it around in earnest, wrapping one arm around Daniel's waist, the other around his chest as he kissed a trail down from his ear along his cheekbone and jaw to his neck, licking at the trickle of blood, and then bit gently at the place where Daniel's neck connected to his shoulder. Daniel moaned and arched back against him, cock already rising and O'Neill realized he was getting hard again as well. Perhaps something in the water had aphrodisiac qualities or perhaps the prospect of imminent death really was the greatest turn-on of all. He could feel the current still tugging at them, a foam of white water from the waterfall spreading out around them in ripples. He bit a little harder and Daniel moaned and flexed, then he wrapped his hand around Daniel's cock and began to stroke it. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the smoke was billowing up into the sky, smudging the blueness, discoloring the clouds. His mouth was full of the solid angle of Daniel's shoulder. As he licked at it, Daniel shivered, but O'Neill could feel his attention straying between what his body was feeling and that trickle of smoke over to the north-west. He bit down on Daniel's shoulder gently to capture his attention and Daniel moaned aloud, making his own body harden in response. He could feel the slippery warmth of Daniel against his body, and instinctively tightened his grip. For the moment he had him here, in his arms, as safe as he could be, but once they were at the mercy of the sea…

Daniel turned his head, needing to look at him, and O'Neill kissed him, his cheekbone, his jaw, and finally his mouth. Their tongues intertwined as the fall poured over them, light breaking through the water. Daniel turning in his grip until they were facing one another. Droplets of water beaded on Daniel's ridiculously long eyelashes, looking for all the world like tears. The mini-cliff face was angled away from them, a slope of wet rock, as inviting as a sunbed and it was instinctive to take Daniel's upper arms in his and gently walk him backwards. He guessed they would have passed those trust exercises they made people do on team-building days because Daniel just took one step and then another without breaking eye contact or even blinking. O'Neill pushed him backwards gently and, after a flicker of surprise from Daniel, the world's most stubborn and argumentative archaeologist allowed himself to be lowered gently onto a shelf of wet rock, O'Neill's hand cradling the back of his head. O'Neill wondered if perhaps Daniel's stubbornness was in direct proportion to how many clothes he was wearing at the time. Perhaps barking, "Daniel, undress!" in the middle of missions from now on would…

Except there would be no missions from now on. All these weeks of it just being him and Daniel, telling himself that this was all it would be from now on, and he had obviously never quite believed it. But this was reality now. He was never going to see Hammond or Carter or Teal'c ever again. Never going to get one of those annoying little light things shone in his eye by Doc Fraiser. He missed them with a sudden fierce regret. He and Daniel had been given this idyll and enjoyed it, but although it had been heaven as a vacation, it was a life change neither of them had signed up for. They hadn't agreed to give up Carter and Teal'c and Hammond forever. To never listen to Carter talking incomprehensible gibberish about wormholes, her face lit up with excitement as she scrawled equations on a whiteboard and invited them to join in her enthusiasm. He never had. He winced in guilt then, thinking of all the indulgent smiles he had given Daniel when he had been equally boring, because he had seemed slightly childlike to him, and his life had been so crap it was good to see him happy. But Carter had lost her mother as a teenager, and although he loved Jacob like a brother it was difficult to imagine him being too hot at communication skills. Had he ever told his motherless daughter she was still loved? That she could confide in him? Somehow he doubted it. He imagined Carter had known almost as much loneliness as Daniel had. Perhaps the least he could have done was listen to her talking about chemicals and pretended just once that he found it interesting. 

And Teal'c… The man was like some brother he had found himself landed with late in life. That sense of connection on first meeting, looking into his eyes and knowing he was seeing a kindred spirit there, that they had both done terrible things, lost people irreplaceable to them and been left as walking wounded, carrying the burden of their losses and their guilt, fired with a need to make amends although they weren't even quite sure to whom. To Daniel, perhaps. Both of them had felt this need to make things up to Daniel. To keep him safe. To make sure the harm that had come to other innocents of their acquaintance didn't come to him. He'd been so busy thinking of his and Daniel's relationship, their partnership, their friendship, their romance, he'd forgotten they were still parts of a larger whole. They would be missed. Missed by people who had the comfort of familiar surroundings and the accompanying guilt. Perhaps they would have receded a little by now but there would be their offices sitting there, silent reproaches to Hammond, who must have called off the search by now, to Teal'c, who hadn't found them in a score of missions looking, to Carter, who hadn't got her sums right this time, because just for once there was no sum to do.

"Jack…?"

Daniel reached up and stroked his wet hair back from his forehead, making O'Neill realize it must have grown long enough for him to do that.

He met his eyes and wondered if Daniel already knew what he was thinking, the way he so often did. "I was thinking about Teal'c and Carter."

Daniel gave him a sad little smile. "I think of them too. There's a part of me that can't accept we're never going to see them again." He looked into the jungle, in the direction of the broken Stargate. "I hope they're okay."

"They'll be fine," he said briskly. They'd strayed into forbidden territory. It didn't make sense to think about the things one couldn't change. He wasn't going to stray into 'if only's. Never had. He had never once said 'I wish Charlie hadn't died'. It was too puerile and too obvious a phrase to get close to that aching hole in his chest where his hopes and dreams for his son's future should have been.

The spray danced over both of them, sliding from Daniel's skin in a fall of light and liquid. "I hope they've stopped searching."

"Don't you want us to be found?" He spoke a little roughly but Daniel took no offence, just looking at him directly.

"I don't want them to die looking."

He'd known that was what he meant, of course. But they'd always kept faith. It didn't matter where they were or how dark things were, it was always his job to say another option would present itself, however impossible it might seem. Daniel would work out the translation, Carter would do the math, Teal'c would find them somehow. He had faked relentless optimism so well for so long he'd evidently convinced himself because he felt panic uncoil in his breast at the silence which stretched too long and which he should have been filling with some assurance that they could still be found, that there might, even now, be a way for them to get home.

As he opened his mouth to say that they shouldn't be talking when they could be kissing, he became simultaneously aware that both their erections had withered and the ground was shaking. 

As they staggered off balance, automatically clutching at one another for support, there was the sound of trees cracking, and a sound from the earth like a giant tearing itself loose. Their eyes met and they read as much fear as resolution in the other's eyes. Then they were running, splashing through the shallows, cursing their nakedness, up onto the bank, back up into the jungle they had sprinted through so carelessly minutes before, running past trees that swayed as if in fear, as if they wished they could tear up their roots and flee also. The butterflies were fluttering in panic, a cloud of them before their eyes and O'Neill thought numbly that it was all a case of biology now, those with wings or fins or opposable thumbs had options of survival, those without had none. Darwin would probably have found something about the situation obscurely satisfying, some theory proven. But as he saw a green-scaled lizard scuttle up the trunk of a tree that would burn and die when the lava flow came, O'Neill found nothing about their situation to like. And then he was digging into that layer that lived just beneath his skin. No doubt Daniel thought he was treacle there, but the truth was he was granite. That was the place he needed to find when his immediate loved ones were threatened, the place that gave him the strength to focus on the essentials and to say to hell with all the rest.

By the time they reached the beach, the monkeys were screaming at them. The tide was coming in, the contagious anger of the volcano making it thunder against the beach. Rowing was going to be hard work. They pulled on their clothes in silence, O'Neill trying to get into a state of total concentration, Daniel looking equally grim, equally absorbed. O'Neill even felt he was doing pretty good as he ran through his checklist and realized everything was ready, all the preparations paying off. The provisions of dried fish and the fresh and dried fruit, the water containers filled in readiness, the coconuts hanging from the mast. Then he saw that faint tremble of Daniel's fingers and, looking down, saw his own were equally unsteady. That was when he realized he was scared half to death.

The raft was quick to load. Despite their trembling fingers they had rehearsed this so many times, imagined it in their mind's eye, being out on the glassy calm or the unfeeling pitch and toss of the sea, trying to envisage everything they were going to need, knowing that however many times they imagined it, when they were out there it would always be different from the way they thought. They had ropes twisted and plaited in readiness to tie everything to. There were even ropes to lash themselves to the mast. Thinking of the sharks, O'Neill checked his ammunition again. He'd kept the revolver as clean as he could, given the way the sand got into everything. Daniel kept telling him he should be grateful he wasn't living in an era where he'd have to keep his powder dry. For some reason that always led to kissing. Daniel had stuffed the food into O'Neill's pack, then threaded a rope through the straps to tie it on. Although it was bulging with provisions, somehow O'Neill knew it wasn't going to be enough. He had climbed and climbed the mountain on this island and never seen anything in the distance except an endless expanse of sea. There should have been other islands, the way there usually was in volcanic chains, atolls scattered along a fault line, mountains created by swelling magma. But all he had seen was the sea.

The ground was shaking, lurching underneath them as if it was trying to shake them loose. The monkeys were still shrieking in panic and he tried not to hear it. He ran for the fish trap, not willing to admit even to himself, that he was going to fetch it, not because they needed it – they had a net – but because he could not bear to be the cause of panicked fish caught in it as the lava poured into the ocean and boiled them alive.

By the time he had released the fish and snatched up the track before sprinting back, Daniel had loaded the last container onto the raft and had the two long poles held in his hand, the ones they cut and stripped the twigs from so they had something to push off with that wouldn't risk the oars. They had turned into a pair of control freaks over the matter of the raft, perhaps because it was the last thing over which they might ever have any control. The monkeys were on the beach now, cautiously approaching the raft. Having seen it grow from one felled palm tree to the huge construction it was now, they were not afraid of it, certainly less afraid of it than they were of the strange ripples coursing through the ground beneath their feet, the steam shooting up from the mouth of the high peak of the volcano with a sound like the earth screaming, the restless anger of the sea. As he ran back down the beach, the baby monkey scrambled onto the raft and began to climb up Daniel, making soft noises demanding comfort.

"Put it down!" O'Neill demanded. When Daniel gave him a begging look, cradling it in his arms, he unhooked the tiny creature's fingers from Daniel's clothes with ruthless determination, then dumped the now screaming monkey on the beach. "It'll die if it comes with us!" he shouted at him, as if it was Daniel's fault.

The monkey was throwing a tantrum on the beach now, throwing sand at the raft then rolling over with its arms wrapped around its head, Daniel watching it as if his heart would break. The rest of the troupe were coming closer, all except the pregnant female finding them less frightening than the way the sea was stirring, the island flexing beneath them. "They'll die if they stay here." Daniel gave him a pleading look that on another day he would never have been able to withstand, but today he just cut through the rope that held the raft in place and the rollers worked as they were meant to, launching them into the sea. As the monkeys shrieked at them for this abandonment, the swell did its best to drive them back to the beach, but O'Neill snatched one of the poles from Daniel and dug it into the shallow ocean floor, pushing them forward, away from their island, the broken gate, the cabin he had built, and the monkeys screaming at them from the still-golden sands, propelling them into the uncertainty of the ocean and the salt lash of the waves.

***

The next wave was always bigger, badder, and had he mentioned _wetter_ than the last. The surface swelled and bucked then reared up to wash straight over them with breath-stealing force, the sea like cold liquid glass, burying them in the freezing shimmers of a thousand prisms. The raft rode the waves awkwardly, lurching up each drenching billow then running down the next with such force it always went under before it bobbed back to the surface, to drench them once again.

Grimly, O'Neill wondered how much they could take of this. They weren't so much fleeing the island as inching away from it, a vigorous haul on the oars would send them skimming over the surface only for the next wave to suck itself out from under them, sledding them under the sea before crashing down on top of them with another shattering of sea glass and stealing of air. At the end of each of those maneuvers they would sometimes find themselves a foot further away from the beach than before, sometimes ten feet closer to it. He could no longer work out if the tide was going in or out, it seemed more interested in tap-dancing all over them with the finesse of a bully in a playground shakedown.

On the plus side, the volcano hadn't erupted yet, although it was still vomiting ash and anger into the dusty sky. On the negative side, Daniel could still see the monkeys on the beach. Except when the next wave was breaking over his head, filling his mouth with saltwater and threatening to snatch the glasses from his face, of course. Then he couldn't see anything. He was being silent and dogged at the moment, that stubborn expression on his face because the sea was thwarting them, but there was a sorrow there too which it hurt O'Neill to look at, because O'Neill had forced him to betray living things who trusted him. 

As another wave broke over them, drenched them, salt-burned their skin, and left their clothes sodden irritants clinging to them weakly, O'Neill wondered if this was their most futile waste of time since they had tried to 'fix' the gate with a pair of long-nosed pliers and a lot of cursing. He couldn't tell if they were making progress or not. Certainly they were a little further from the beach than they'd been two hours before, and further, he thought, than two hours before that, but the huge outlay in energy was hardly being justified by the few feet they were stealing back from the angry sea. He kept telling himself that when they got past the rocks the sea would calm down but now he had to admit, if only to himself, that it wouldn't. There were too many upheavals taking place beneath the surface, the seabed rippling with annoyance as the molten rocks shifted. There had probably been other islands once, scores of them thrown up by a volcano chain, fertile paradises dotted along a hidden fault line, but one by one the earth had claimed them back again, and now it was the turn of their island to be swallowed whole or buried under lava. And where did that leave them except pulling desperately against boiling waves and furious currents only to escape to an open nothingness on which they would slowly blister and curl under the frying midday sun.

Daniel spat out a mouthful of seawater. "I always suspected outdoor sports were overrated."

Glancing across at him, O'Neill was a little reassured by how strong Daniel looked. A part of his mind was still frozen at the point where Daniel had been a dying invalid, and that expected to see the pale-skinned weak-as-a-kitten man he had needed to spoonfeed just to keep breathing in and out. The reality of Daniel now was this sun-gilded vision of health and strength with those lean muscles across his chest and upper arms that the wet t-shirt he was wearing did nothing to disguise. The wet pants, cut off at the knee, did nothing to disguise the length of long golden legs either. O'Neill pulled on the oar automatically, his body matching itself to Daniel's with what was now the skill of long practice. In bed or out of it they could always seem to find a rhythm. He watched Daniel as his body did as O'Neill's was doing, bending as it pulled against the sea, the muscles on his arms tightening, his stomach clenching in just the way it did when his whole body tightened around – 

"Jack!"

He barely ducked his head in time as the next wave rolled over them, hanging on tightly to the oar as the sea emptied itself over them, a gift that just kept right on giving even when the oxygen had run out and there wasn't an orifice left unfilled with blistering saltwater.

"Are you okay?" Daniel asked anxiously.

It was only now that it was so wet that O'Neill noticed Daniel's hair had grown a little. He looked very similar now to the way he had when he'd stumbled out of the ocean after having his brain vacuumed by the fish-guy. Then as now he was a sight for literally sore eyes.

O'Neill turned his head and spat out half a pint of ocean. "You taste so much better."

Daniel gaped at him. "You're thinking about sex _now_?"

"I'm a guy, Daniel."

"So am I."

O'Neill looked him up and down in all his soaking wet glory. "I noticed."

" _I'm_ thinking about imminent death," Daniel pointed out.

O'Neill shrugged. "Each to his own."

The next wave followed, and the next, and O'Neill had to admit that even he could no longer cling onto thoughts of Daniel naked with his long legs wrapped around O'Neill's eager body when each wave seemed higher and angrier than the next. His muscles were aching, at first his back, then his arms and back, then everything, shoulders, chest, ribs, spine, knees, ankles, every muscle in his body locked uncomfortably into place as he braced himself against the waves. Then there was the sun beating down in the moments when the sea wasn't covering them, not enough to dry or warm them, just a sudden splintering of light to the eyes, a laser glow to the temples that summoned a migraine long before it dried garments about to be drenched all over again. However hard they rowed, the sea was always so much stronger than they were, able to toss them to one side on a whim, push them under, spin them round, throw them closer and closer to the ragged rocks that guarded the entrance to the bay. 

They were already exhausted from gaining each difficult foot from the sea, and now there were the rocks to battle with. The swell was terrible here, the waves apparently pulled in all directions at once and some undertow intent on tugging them east, towards the outcrop of rocks upon which gulls were flying up as each wave broke over them, the seaweed glistening green, the rocks black with the swell of the sea. Daniel was rowing with all his strength, the veins standing out on his arms as he pulled and pulled at the oar but the current was still dragging them towards the rocks while the waves seemed to take pleasure in breaking over them with renewed vigor. 

"We need to turn it!" O'Neill shouted in the brief pause between one wave and the next.

Daniel nodded and they dug their oars in deep, trying to spin the unwieldy raft around, to catch a current that would tug them past the edge. They succeeded in slowing their advance, but the next wave covered them and pushed them and they both flinched as Daniel's edge of the raft scraped painfully against rock. Daniel kicked off hard from the weed-slippery surface of rocks that O'Neill had already been informed were definitely igneous and probably intrusive. He supposed he should be grateful that Daniel didn't take a moment there to check the grain size. Another kick from Daniel's long legs in a welcome lull from the next wave and they were pushed back into the sea. O'Neill dug his oar in hard, trying to twist them around to catch the edge of the outgoing current, and felt the raft snag and tug the way they needed it to go. The next wave breaking over them almost felt like an old friend, the shock of the cold reduced by familiarity. He spat out another mouthful of seawater and looked across at Daniel, who looked tired but dogged. There had been many occasions in the past when O'Neill had been given cause to curse Daniel's stubbornness but today he was nothing other than grateful for it. The guy had come along way from the poor kid on Apophis's ship saying 'We're blind and we failed'.

"We're going to make it," O'Neill called across to him.

Daniel pulled hard on the oar, their bodies molding themselves to the uncertain rhythms of the sea, a heartbeat they were starting to learn to listen for, a pattern they were starting to sense. He looked across at O'Neill and gave him a smile that was sweet and stubborn at once. "Damned right we are."

Then it was just them and the sea in a three-way battle between their aching muscles, the wash of the waves, and the silent power of the current.

 

The sun died beautifully on the open sea. Daniel gazed and gazed at it, the sky reddening then darkening, then that last faint glow before it sank beneath the waves. He was relieved that it was nightfall if only because it meant he couldn't see the island any longer. The volcano hadn't erupted yet but he had no doubt that it was going to. He couldn't see the monkeys now either but he knew they were there, waiting for a rescue that wasn't going to come. Knowing it was irrational didn't stop him feeling terrible. A part of him believed the monkeys thought that he and Jack had gone for help, not just for themselves but for everyone, except the human race didn't do that, did it, it just cut and run and left every other sentient species to fend for themselves. The way the Goa'uld dropped human hosts off on fertile planets then experimented on them for a while before getting bored and going elsewhere, leaving their slaves to leave and die as chance decided. Power without responsibility…

"Daniel…?"

He blinked and realized he had been drifting off, only the ache in every muscle holding him to sentience. His rowing was feeble now, pathetic crab catching, they should have been going in circles. When he looked across at Jack he saw that the only reason they weren't circling was because Jack was as exhausted as he was, leaning on his oar and barely flexing his wrists to move it. As they had passed the rocks the sea was a little less violent now but all it would take was a turn of the tide and they would be carried back through all the sea they had battled against with such effort to get this far. 

"You okay?"

Jack looked anxious in the starlight, gray hair turned to silver, skin oddly pale. Daniel wished that he was close enough to kiss, but there were too many tree trunks between them and they were both anchored to an oar. "I'm fine, Jack. You?"

"Beat." The smile was tentative. "I'm getting too old for this shit."

Daniel found him a smile in return. "Pretend it's sex."

"It's nothing like sex."

"Come on, it's exhausting, it makes you sweaty and makes your back ache, and you can do it over and over even after the point when you think you really have to stop now."

A much wider smile. "If anything could sell me on this being a positive experience, it would be you."

Daniel opened his mouth to retort and then realized Jack had just been nice to him. He missed their cabin. Missed both the lives they'd lost in the last few months. Quiet morning coffees in companionable silence in each other's offices, and their brief idyll in paradise. A restless sea was no substitute for either one. He was already sick of the constant tease of the horizon line, the undulating turquoise nothingness of the sea. "Same here, Flyboy," he said gently. "Wherever I lay my Jack, that's my home."

Jack made to get up and then slumped back again. "This really sucks. I'm too tired even to kiss you."

Daniel looked up at the stars and they were moving in the wrong direction, a slow bleed to the north. "We need to keep rowing."

"I know." He saw Jack dig in, the way he always did, summoning strength from somewhere within himself. Then the man was gritting his teeth and digging the oar into the water.

His arms were shaking with the effort as Daniel followed suit. It was a knack, he knew, finding a place to float above the pain, to keep aching muscles moving. It was okay as long as you didn't stop. If they stopped they were lost. Not only would they be carried back to the island upon which a volcano was about to erupt, their bodies would never work again.

After a few minutes of back-breaking effort he looked up to see the stars were back where they had been before. They were moving in the right direction again, but the sea had as much vigor as it had done ten hours before and they were already exhausted. He had to look across at Jack to remind himself of why this effort was worth it. They had too much to live for to allow themselves to be defeated by the sea.

Hours passed to the irregular wash of waves across creaking timbers, the constant ache of exhausted muscles not being able to rest. Still there was a kind of rhythm to it, even if it was the rhythm of the way pain followed numbness and numbness followed pain. All around them was a starlit darkness, milky with moonlight when the clouds parted, an unbearable brightness of distant pinpricks of light. When he looked at them for too long his eyes began to water, with effort or nostalgia. They had lost so much since then, since he had realized the language of the Stargate lay in the pattern of the constellations. He supposed that meant that if they died here, that would be his fault. He and Jack had tried to map these stars, he saw them as pictures, wanted to make up stories to explain their shape, Jack remembered them as game plans, defensive passes, strategies for victory. Trying to imagine them giving a powerpoint presentation on the subject in the future was a little tricky. "This is the unicorn, because Daniel thinks that's what it looks like because of this spike of stars here, and this trailing bit that could be mane and tail, although frankly, I don't think so. Now, this constellation I call the Winnebago Strategy used by the Chicago Blue Chickenhawks in the 1969 final against the Houston Pinstriped Rhinos…" He might not be remembering the teams Jack tended to cite with total accuracy, Daniel realized, as he tended to nod off when Jack got to that point. 

"You okay…?"

He jerked his head up and realized he had stopped rowing. "Yes. Sorry. Must have dozed off." It was difficult not to let the panic show, but for how long really could they keep doing this? They were never going to be able to get far enough away from the island not to be enveloped by the consequences of the cataclysm about to rain upon it in a hail of fire and molten rock. The seas would boil and rise in a wall of green rage. It wasn't enough to be moving away, they needed to have somewhere to go _to_. 

"We can do this," Jack said again.

Daniel found a weary smile for him. "Sure we can."

"Piece of cake."

"With whipped cream and strawberries on top."

He saw Jack's tongue flicker over his dry lips. "A minute ago I was thinking death by drowning. Now I'm thinking about you naked, on my bed, with whipped cream and strawberries all over you."

He didn't have the heart to remind him that there was no bed for either of them now. The bedrooms they had left behind would be given to someone else, if not now, then later. They would be another guilty secret the Air Force would have to hush up, more names to add to the list of disappeared, probably in invisible ink. Daniel missed his apartment with a sudden fierce longing, missed his books and his things, and the proofs of his existence. He wanted to hold that wedding bowl again, to touch the texture of it against his fingers and his lips and remember Sha're. He hated the fact that Jack no longer had a place to call his own in which he could stand a photograph of his dead son. But aloud he said only, "That sounds good to me. As long as you're going to be licking off the strawberries and whipped cream at some point."

"That was definitely the idea." Jack pulled on the oar raggedly, too shallow a stroke, flicking up a silver rippling of water.

Daniel found his body had forgotten the rhythms of rowing in that brief pause, and dug too deep, slicing through the water. The raft jolted like a car whose gears had snagged, lifting slightly out of the water. A rogue swell he presumed. His next pull on the oar reminded him of how sore his hands were, how much his back ached. The third one was too shallow and there was another delicate fall of water, the starlight picking out each droplet as it rose and fell. His body was uncoordinated with exhaustion. He wasn't sure he could do this any more. Looking across at Jack he saw the man was slumped over his oar, yanking at it awkwardly. There were lots of jokes about inadequate masturbation that just cried out to be made but he didn't have the brain energy left to formulate them, and Jack was too precious to him even to tease right now.

"You look really sexy when you're rowing," he offered.

Jack raised his head, some of the defeat in his neck and shoulders being turned into a positive movement, another summoning of strength from deep within. "Doctor Jackson, are you trying to seduce me?"

Daniel shrugged. "Well, you know, I always heard Air Force colonels were easy."

"Really?" A positive flash of teeth. "Well, I always heard archaeologists drop their boxers faster than they –" The words froze in Jack's throat then and he went still. Daniel knew something was behind him. Something bad. Even before Jack quietly reached for his gun every hair on his neck was standing on end. "…drop their rocks," Jack finished and swallowed. "Move into the middle of the raft, Daniel. Do it now."

He moved and a wash of water followed him, very cold on his skin, a wave displaced by something. As he scrabbled across the sea-slippery curves of the lashed trunks, he realized how low in the water a raft was. Not like a boat. Nothing like a boat. Level with the sea, no viewpoint, no protection, an ice floe was higher off the surface of the water. Another wave lapped over the raft, proof of something heavy moving through the water, other than that whatever was circling them was almost silent. He put his back against the mast and looked at Jack. The man was beautiful in the starlight, the silver light on his silver hair, the line of his jaw, the unexpected length of his eyelashes, the nap of his jaw, the coarse stubble that didn't feel coarse at all when you rubbed your eager skin against it. He could see the muscles in his upper arm, lean and unshowy, like all of Jack's physique, quietly confident, quietly fit. Remembering the taste of his skin, how it felt to lick and nibble and how it smelled when your face was pressed against it, Daniel hoped it seemed less edible to sea monsters.

"What is it?" he whispered.

"Just a fin." Jack brought the oar with him as he moved over to sit next to Daniel, also with his back against the mast, the skimpy shelter something a determined spaniel could have gnawed its way through in minutes, never mind a shark.

Daniel swallowed hard. "So it could be a dolphin?"

"Could be." But the unwavering straightness of Jack's arm with the revolver on the end of it like an extension of his psyche said otherwise.

"How big a fin?" Daniel gripped the end of the rope they had around the mast just for something to hang onto.

He saw that muscle flicker in Jack's jaw again. "Pretty big."

Daniel saw something dark against the darkness, more solid than the ocean. As clouds drifted to let the starlight free it revealed a firm outline of blackness against the shifting silvery blue sea. He touched Jack's arm. "As big as that?"

Jack was unwilling to move his gaze from where he had last seen the other fin but he did so albeit reluctantly. Daniel felt him tense beside him but his voice was calm. "About the same size."

Another fin cut through the water with the purposeful swiftness of a submarine turret just before a dive. Three of them now. Circling the raft. Daniel found a smile with difficulty. "They aren't dolphins, are they?" He noticed his oar wasn't properly secured, tilting in its rowlock, ready to slip free. Without a second oar they were dead.

"No." Jack looked locked down tight, ready to kill.

Spills of moonlight puddled on the surface of the waves, shimmers of uncolor, light just lapping there in a shade of gray that was neither blue nor silver but something in between. Cautiously, Daniel inched towards the place where he had left the oar. As he moved, another wave lapped over the raft and the oar shifted, it was leaving a small wake in the sea, a faint splash of surface tension as its stone-ground edge trailed through the waves. As he inched towards it he felt a hand close on his ankle and looked over his shoulder at Jack. The man grimaced. "Falling in the sea wouldn't be a good idea right now."

"You don't say," Daniel hissed over his shoulder.

He saw Jack holster his gun then, wrapping his fingers in the rope around the mast instead. Another wave lapped over them and the oar slipped again, deepening the furrow it was cutting in the sea. It was going. Daniel dived for it, barely grabbing at the slippery wood. As his fingers closed on it, he felt the raft jolt in the water then tip, waves rushing up to meet him. As he tried to haul himself backwards with gravity and the slippery surface of the raft against him, he saw a huge cavern open in the water below him. A cavern with teeth. As the open mouth lunged at him he could only frantically push off with the oar. The curving teeth snapped down on the oar at once to taste the wood then opened its mouth again, splinters floating in the sea. As the rush of water did its best to carry him into the shark's mouth, a firm yank on his ankle hauled him across the slippery timbers to the makeshift shelter. He found he was still gripping the end of an oar that now ended abruptly in a splinter of snapped wood. As the shark lunged after him, the raft tilted ominously, then as the shark slid off the planks, slapped back down into the ocean, sending a wave over both of them. Jack let go of his ankle only to grab his arm and yank him upright. They both pressed against the mast, hearts beating too fast while the fins circled them.

"Sharks don't usually attack unless provoked." Daniel could feel his teeth wanting to chatter. Still seeing those huge teeth curved inwards and that dark gullet beckoning him in.

Jack gave him a look of exasperation, still hanging onto his arm. "Maybe no one told them that."

As always when seriously spooked, Daniel took refuge in book knowledge: "The rhythmic splashing noise we were making with the oars probably sounded like fish to them. Didn't you say there were tuna shoals out here? I think we may be in a shark feeding area."

Jack's grip on his arm showed no sign of lessening. "I think you may be right."

Daniel thought it was probably best if he just kept talking. Apart from anything else it would disguise the manic samba his heart was currently doing inside his chest. "That's why they're campaigning to get fish-feeding dive tours banned in Florida. They say it's not fair on the diver who turns up in an area where sharks are usually fed on a day when the guy who feeds them isn't there. We could be the equivalent of that right now."

"What, they're pissed because they were expecting tunafish?"

"The tuna may have responded to the oncoming volcano and left the area. If these are young sharks they may not have known that the changes the tuna responded to are danger signals. They're just wondering where their dinner is."

He and Jack exchanged a laden glance and Jack winced. "And here we are. Sweet."

Still speaking rapidly, Daniel said, "Older wiser sharks will have followed the shoals but these are obviously hanging around where the fish usually are getting more and more hungry and confused."

"And pissed." Jack checked his revolver. "I'm definitely sensing they're pissed."

"You don't have to shoot them." Daniel was never going to like the way Jack automatically saw a bullet as the answer to all problems.

Jack gave him one of his vintage exasperated looks. The ones he saved for those special occasions. "You have another plan, do you?"

"They could be an endangered species."

Jack rolled his eyes. " _We're_ endangered! In case it's somehow escaped your attention, we've got three hungry sharks circling our raft!"

"I'm just pointing out that they're doing what they always do, we're the ones who've got in their way."

Jack jammed the ammo clip back in. "Well, now they're in my way, and if they don't want to get shot they'd better get out of my way, pronto."

Daniel decided that he could also roll his eyes. "You know, there are days when I have more evolved things growing in the back of my fridge than – " There was real grace in the way the shark moved up out of the water, grace and silence, particularly given how huge it was. Most predators tended to roar as they showed you their teeth, but not sharks apparently, they just came straight for you with their mouths open wide, not caring that they were fish out of water as they used the edge of your raft for leverage. Or rather came straight for the guy sitting next to you, because although there was no expression in those liquid black eyes, it was heading for Jack and clearly seeing him as lunch. As he gazed into that yawning maw, those inward curving rows of teeth, and felt the raft tip beneath them, Daniel remembered that he still had the broken oar in his hand and swung it hard, aiming for the nose. That was their vulnerable spot, so he'd once read somewhere or maybe watched on the Discovery channel on some long boring Sunday when a translation wouldn't cooperate, that was what the book or program had said, anyway, but had anyone bothered to tell the shark?

Apparently they had as it slithered back off the raft with less grace than it had climbed on and splished back into the water, the raft rocking wildly from the displacement. Daniel grabbed the mast and hauled them both back under the shelter. "Are sharks usually that big?"

"No." Jack darted him a quick sideways look. "Thanks by the way." He sounded mildly surprised.

"You're welcome."

"That was kind of sexy."

Daniel looked at him in disbelief. "You get off on being attacked by sharks?"

"No, but I like the way you sprang to my defense there."

Daniel wrinkled his nose in mild embarrassment. "I may have had a bit of a rush of blood to the head."

"Really?" Jack looked pointedly at his groin. "You're full of surprises."

The thud on the wood beneath them and the way the raft lifted from the surface of the sea before flopping down again was not a pleasant sensation. Daniel and Jack exchanged a laden glance and Daniel wondered if Jack could hear the thumping of his heart. Another jolt underneath them and again the raft rose out of the water before dropping back down into the sea with a splash. If it had been a lighter craft it would undoubtedly have been flipped over by that strategy by now. As an anthropologist, Daniel couldn't help wondering if this was the proof that there must be inhabited islands nearby, or else how would the sharks have learned how to flip over fishing boats? Or was it a race memory passed on from the days when their island had been inhabited? Again the raft lifted and then jolted, rocking on the waves as it fell back to the sea, apparently too heavy to be flipped.

Jack looked grim but he found a smile for Daniel. "You see, sometimes size is important."

At the soft sound of water moving, Daniel jerked his head around and saw a shark rear up out of the sea and throw itself onto the raft. The weight of the huge fish made the raft tilt violently and he began to slide towards its open jaws. As he slithered across the wet timbers, he felt another wave wash over him, speeding him on his way.

"Daniel!" A hand grabbed his wrist but he was slippery with seawater and Jack was barely holding him.

The shark was splashing vigorously with its muscular tail, pushing itself up out of the water and onto the raft. Such black eyes, completely blank, no expression. And those open jaws…

"My, what big teeth you have…" Daniel breathed. He tried to wriggle back up the raft but as the shark flexed its body again, the raft tilted further and he slid down towards the waiting teeth. He saw the jaws gape wider, felt Jack's fingers slip from his wrist and then his feet were going into the yawning maw of the shark's mouth and his brain was locked with fear and the expectation of unbearable pain. Then something closed on his t-shirt and he was bodily yanked out of the shark's mouth. As his booted feet were pulled clear, the jaws closed with a sickening snap. He reached desperately for something solid, the mast, the ropes that lashed the timbers together, but found only Jack. The man was still hanging onto him, hand fisted in his t-shirt, and Daniel inhaled his scent as he clung to him, wet Jack O'Neill, wet clothing, fear. They looked into each other's eyes and he said weakly, "Thank you."

"You're welcome." Jack was also breathing fast. He hauled them both towards the mast and Daniel grabbed at it eagerly. They both locked their fingers in the rope around the mast, hanging on as the next shark tried to bellyflop its way onto the timbers, its body twisting as it did so, head thrashing from side to side. The raft tilted under its weight and Jack leveled his gun. "I don't have any choice," he said grimly. "If it turns us over we're dead."

"I know." Daniel turned his head away. He had killed serpent guards in the past and taught himself not to lie awake and think about it for too many nights. He accepted that sometimes you had to kill people who were trying to kill you, even if they were misguided victims of an oppressor who pretended to be a god, but it didn't make it right, just what you had to do if you wanted to keep breathing in and out more than you wanted to live with being someone who had killed. And he had to put himself in that group. He didn't want to die, and he didn't want the people he loved to die, he just didn't think made his cause any more just than anyone else's or his life worth more than his. There were no shortage of humans in the galaxy and for all they knew these might be the last three of these sharks left anywhere but he still wanted Jack to pull the trigger if the alternative was him and Jack being eaten alive. "I just think sometimes that if we didn't have a gun we'd have to think of some other way."

The raft rocked and they were being lifted out of the water at a steep angle now, both of them trying to throw their weight the other way to push the raft back down. Jack leveled his gun again and pointed it at one of the shark's dead black eyes. "Fuck off," he told it through gritted teeth. "Go chase some fish." But his finger didn't close on the trigger yet, giving it one last chance.

It slid back off the raft and then splashed back down into the ocean, water washing over both of them while the raft lurched clumsily. Another shark tried to drive its way up onto the raft with rhythmic waves of its muscular tail. Daniel had to admit they were perfectly designed killing machines, all that strength and power, those terrifying teeth and those dead, pitiless eyes. He wondered what it must be like to function without a conscience, without compassion. How simple the world must seem when your only needs were selfish. While still hanging onto the mast with his left hand, he grabbed the other oar and smacked the oncoming shark on the nose with it sharply. It retreated at once, wriggling back into the sea, face still eerily expressionless when another creature might have shown indignation or anger.

"Do you think this is a bit of cosmic justice because of all those fish I've caught over the years?" Jack enquired.

Daniel darted him a sideways glance. "What 'fish you've caught'? I thought your lifetime tally was three car tires, two boots, and a barrel load of condoms?"

Jack blinked. "You know, that would sting less if the boots had been a pair."

Again the raft jolted as it was thumped from underneath. Daniel hung onto the mast grimly. "Is this the point where we compare scars?"

"You just want us to do that because you know you'd win." The thumping stopped and the fins circled them again. Jack watched them warily. "I do know all the words to 'Show Me The Way To Go Home'."

"Why doesn't that surprise me?" He was fumbling for a better grip on his oar as he spoke, noticing the world was significantly lighter all around them. The darkest hour giving way to the pre-dawn glimmerings of lightening gray. Now when the sharks circled the raft he could see their fins clearly, see the darkness of their bodies beneath the surface of the sea. "They are kind of beautiful," he offered.

"And they're going to be very dead if they don't take a hike." Jack leaned over to take a better look at them as they swam past. "Shark fin soup mean anything to you guys?"

The shark came up out of nowhere, huge, determined, and clearly very hungry. It loomed out of the water and hit the raft hard. They tilted up so high that for a moment they were almost upright, and then the angle of the raft and the shark's own weight sent it slipping back into the sea. When the they smacked down into the water, the raft went under several feet as a wave washed over them, and for a moment they were lurching the other way, too close to the open jaws of sharks. Jack swore sharply, and then they leveled out again, wet and scared and in Daniel's case, at least, extremely jittery. He turned to look at the gun in Jack's hand, comforted by it even as he disapproved of it, and found himself staring instead at an empty hand with blood running from it in an open gash across the palm. Jack was staring at his hand as if he had no idea who it belonged to.

Daniel grabbed his wrist to examine it better, counting fingers and then counting them again to be certain. Four fingers. One thumb. All present and correct. The bloody gash across his palm looked nasty though. "What happened?"

Jack looked at him in disbelief. "That damned shark ate my gun. Just took it straight out of my hand."

Daniel pulled off his t-shirt and wrapped it around the man's hand. He noticed Jack looking at his bare torso and rolled his eyes. "Jack! We're trying to keep your blood out of the water here."

"Oh." Jack finished wrapping the cloth around his arm. "Sorry. I thought the striptease was to distract me from the pain. It worked too."

"Try not to bleed on anything you don't want eaten." Daniel shoved Jack behind him purposefully and tightened his grip on the oar. Of course, if their last intact oar was eaten by sharks, they were just going to drift aimlessly across the open sea, but he still felt that was preferable to them being eaten and their bloody remains being left to drift across the open sea. As the next shark came up at them, he hit it hard and purposefully on the nose. It slid back into the sea, but as the next one came up it had its mouth open wide so there was no chance of hitting it on anything except the teeth. As the raft tipped and did its best to spill them into the waiting jaws, Daniel tried to hold onto Jack, the mast, and the oar, only to find that Jack was hanging onto him and the mast. "Damnit, Jack," he breathed. "You only have one good hand."

"I only have one good archaeologist too," the man retorted.

Daniel tried to swing the oar but the shark was faster than he was, twisting with incredible grace and power, to snap down on the wooden spar. He hit out at it with the piece of oar he had left and it twisted again, snapping at him venomously. Kicking out, he hit it on the nose more by luck than judgment and it slipped back into the water. Exchanging a look with Jack he realized that the sun was coming up, the man more than a ghostly glimmer now, the sea had a red and golden haze to what they thought of as the east. It occurred to him that it might not rise in the east on this world, they had just decided that it did to make themselves feel less homesick. He also realized he was so tired he was worrying about compass points because that was easier than getting to grips with the reality of sharks closing in to eat them who were not going to just get bored and go away.

The raft was rocking from the force of the sea. A thump underneath it lifted it out of the water before it fell down again with another awkward splash. He moved close to Jack as they watched the fins circling them again, the dark bodies of the sharks now clearly visible in the water. He could see Jack's face, the furring of his jaw from the new stubble, coarse silvery hair he wanted to rub his cheek against. Another jolt from underneath the raft, another sickening pause as their craft was lifted out of the water then allowed to drop. Another wave washing over the timbers. Then the largest of the sharks reared out of the water, twisting its glistening muscular body up onto the raft, jaws open, eyes black pools of nothingness. Daniel yelled and banged the broken oar down on the raft but it didn't blink, perhaps they couldn't blink or perhaps it just didn't care. It was using its tail to push itself further onto the raft, tilting them dramatically. Even clinging on tight to the mast, they couldn't stop gravity pulling their feet nearer to that advancing mouth. Daniel tried to get some purchase on the slippery deck but the waves were washing over them, the other sharks gathering where their fellow was advancing, also trying to get purchase to wriggle their way up the slippery timbers. They snapped at one another as they tried to push themselves up higher, the swell helping them as the waves seemed to urge them on their way, each one that washed over the raft lifting the sharks a little higher. Daniel saw the red trickle of Jack's blood in the water from the gash on his hand, the smell no doubt maddening to hungry sharks bewildered by the disappearance of their usual food source. He yanked his foot just out of the way of a snapping pair of jaws and saw Jack whisk his boot away from a threshing shark just in time. Daniel hit out with the spar, but the shark opened its jaws wide, protecting its nose and giving him only a yawning gullet and those terrifying teeth to strike at. When the jaws snapped close on air he swore he felt every hair on his body stand on end. Looking to Jack, he saw the same desperation in the man's eyes that he felt himself. 

The raft was tilting at a more and more acute angle now, more like a ski slope than a means to float on the surface of the sea. They were both clinging to the rope around the mast, but Daniel could see the blood running down Jack's arm where the man was stubbornly persisting in holding on with his injured hand and clinging to Daniel with his undamaged left hand. 

"Hold on properly!" Daniel demanded.

Jack gave him his most stubborn look and Daniel had opened his mouth to tell him what he thought of him when another wave helped the threshing sharks another foot up the tilting raft. The vessel gave another awkward lurch and Daniel barely whipped his foot out of the way of a pair of hungry jaws. As the other shark lunged at him he swiped at it desperately with the broken oar and it bit down hard on the snapped end then jerked its head to the side so savagely he was pulled with the oar. For a sickening second he thought he was about to be hurled into the sea and then he was yanked back by Jack's fingers in his t-shirt and slammed into the man, groping blindly for something to hang onto as the next wave washed over them. He grabbed for the rope around the mast just as the next shark lunged at them and now they had nothing with which to fend it off except their feet. Daniel kicked out hard and connected with something softer than teeth, but the shark only slithered back a foot at the most. "Thank you," he breathed quickly to Jack, horribly aware that it might be the last thing he ever got the chance to say to him. He dug his fingers into the man's t-shirt, all twisted up with his need to keep a grip on both mast and man. His heart was beating too fast and when he looked across at Jack he saw the man was also breathing quickly. Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel saw a shark swim purposefully past. Two advancing. One circling. Wonderful.

Jack was looking around for something to hurl at the sharks while Daniel kicked seawater in their faces in what he freely admitted was rank desperation. On another occasion he might have been able to appreciate their beauty better, the incredible power in their slippery muscular bodies as they threshed and wriggled themselves higher up the raft, open jaws swinging from side to side as they gained momentum against gravity from the sea.

Then the next wave carried them higher and they were lunging, Daniel kicking out savagely and catching one in the side of the head while Jack slammed his boot down as hard as he could on the other one's nose. But they could scent the blood now and were not put off, advancing with jaws open, a pale gape of maw and teeth. Daniel could see the teeth curving backwards. He and Jack pulled themselves as close to the mast as they could, but as the next wave began to roll up the ramp they could both see that it would carry both the threshing sharks with it and this time there would be no escape.

At the familiar but momentarily inexplicable thud of rings dropping around then, Daniel looked at Jack in disbelief. The sharks were still advancing on the impetus of another blue-green wave but now there were metal rings between them and the sharks, followed by light and then abruptly the sharks were gone and everything was a gold-lit confusion. Then there was darkness, and the rings lifting, as if they were animals being released from a cage, letting out a rush of water that spilled across the surface of a metal ridged floor that was as real as it was impossible.

Daniel looked at Jack in disbelief. "Rings," he said.

"Tel'tak." Jack reached for a gun that wasn't there.

In unison they both said: "Goa'uld."

"Close, but no cigar." After a last panicked look at one another they turned their heads, not even daring to hope, although the voice had sounded so very much like:

"Jacob…?" Jack rose awkwardly to his knees, still hanging onto Daniel's bare arm.

"Jacob…?" Daniel also found his fingers were locked into Jack's t-shirt and were refusing to let go.

Jacob Carter smiled at them, not just the smile of a man who had plucked them literally from the jaws of death yet again, but of a man who was so pleased to see them he was only a blink away from tears. "Welcome home, boys. We missed you."

***

O'Neill realized that he now knew what 'culture shock' meant, and this was it. Some part of his brain simply couldn't accept that the life that had been lost to him was now beckoning again. Even as Teal'c said, 'O'Neill', and embraced him, as he was wrapped in a Jaffa hug that enfolded him as gently as if he were made of crystal and liable to snap, even as Carter gave that cry and then ran to wrap her arms around Daniel, rocking him as she sobbed while he tentatively touched her hair, bending his head to breathe in her scent to see if it was truly Carter, a part of his mind thought he must be dreaming. This was the world he and Daniel had lost. They had both resigned themselves to the fact it could never be found again, that they were irretrievable. Yet somehow they had been found. He didn't know what he felt: panic and relief at once. A fear that this might turn out to be a dream, not something he could relax into yet, and at the same time a fear it might be real, and if it were real, that he and Daniel as they were now, a unit, a couple, might somehow disappear in the transition back to who they had been.

He darted a look at Jacob, whom he had never seen in any reality but this one, and the man nodded. "It's real, Jack. We found you."

"How?" Daniel was still hugging Carter. Not being given much choice, of course, given the way she had him wrapped into an embrace that seemed likely to crush his ribcage if she squeezed a little harder. "How did you find us?"

Jacob grimaced then and pointed. "We had a little help from a friend of yours, Daniel."

As Teal'c released him from the embrace and stepped back O'Neill looked up and saw…himself. Then realized it was not himself but rather _that_ O'Neill. The one who called Daniel 'Doc'. The one he'd last seen dumping Daniel in a seedy motel room, ten minutes after seeing him humping Daniel in a seedy motel room. He made to start forward, not sure what he wanted to say or do, only knowing that it was hostile, but Teal'c's solid hand on his chest stopped him.

The Jaffa said quietly, "Without the assistance of Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson we would never have found you."

That was when he saw the other person standing next to the Xerox O'Neill. Daniel. Not the Daniel he knew, but the 'Jackson' he had used to know. The Jackson who had saved his life on the Abydos mission. The clumsy annoying geek about whom he had felt those impatient stabs of protective affection. The innocent genius who had been so stubborn, so maddening, so knowledgeable about some things and so frighteningly clueless about others. Surely even a ratfucking amoral bastard like the other O'Neill wouldn't have…? He darted the visiting O'Neill a quick horrified glance but the man wasn't looking at him, he was looking at Daniel. The real Daniel. His Daniel.

O'Neill turned quickly and saw that, worse, his Daniel was looking at the wrong O'Neill. Not just looking, but smiling, at another man, fond and emotional, a beat away from tears. "How did you find us?"

O'Neill's doppelganger winced. "I tagged you. Electronically. Some Tollan gizmo. Sorry. I was afraid to ask, in case you said 'no'."

Daniel blinked then nodded, face hard to read. "I would have said 'no'. So, if that's how you found us, I'm glad you didn't ask."

Another smile. O'Neill hated this. Hated the reminder of how these two had always been so damned comfortable with one another. Then the visiting O'Neill was drawing forward the fair-haired Jackson, a curious mixture of pride and guilt on his face. "This is Daniel."

"I think he could probably have worked that out for himself, Jack." Jackson nodded to Daniel and held out a hand. "Pleased to meet you."

Daniel went forward and shook his hand, darting a quick look at the visiting O'Neill as he did so, asking him a question with his eyes.

The man smiled and touched Jackson on the shoulder. "Daniel wants to know if I've got up the courage to tell you how I feel about you yet."

Jackson damned near blushed, certainly the base of his lobeless ears looked a little pink. "We're…married."

"Married?" O'Neill demanded in disbelief. He looked at his doppelganger aghast. "But he's just a kid."

His Daniel winced, that wince he always did when he thought O'Neill was doing something tactless, which in this case he actually wasn't, so he didn't know what the wince was in aid of. Given the way this Jackson looked like such a kid, O'Neill thought it was nothing other than a fair question. Daniel turned his head and did one of those annoying out of the side of his mouth mutters: "Jack, he's the same age as I am."

O'Neill turned to Daniel in disbelief. "He looks about twelve!"

Daniel gritted his teeth and gave one of those flickering little hand gestures and hissed: "And he's standing right there, and I doubt there is a whole lot wrong with his hearing." The smile he gave Jackson was full of apology, a sort of grimacing wince and shrug combined. O'Neill gave him a look of exasperation. How many planets had they been to now where Daniel had done that whole 'sorry about the troglodyte' thing?

The fair-haired Jackson looked between them in confusion. "Are you a…couple?"

"No, they always sound like that," Carter assured him, beginning to unwrap the t-shirt from O'Neill's hand. "Teal'c and I often used to say we should have t-shirts printed with 'no, they're just good friends' on them to save visiting dignitaries embarrassing Daniel by asking him that question all the…" She broke off and looked between them, then looked at Teal'c, then at her father, blue eyes very wide, mouth very open. She reminded him of Daniel in that instant and he realized he hadn't hugged her yet, and that he really wanted to.

Jacob said quickly, "In the Air Force in our dimension, Doctor Jackson, that's not a question they can answer. Certainly not in front of any serving members of the United States Air Force." He darted a look at O'Neill and then jerked his head at his daughter.

"I'll just get the first aid kit…" She sounded dazed, darting a gaze between them wistfully. Feeling excluded, perhaps.

O'Neill held out his arms and said, "Carter, damnit, give an old man a hug."

She was there in an instant, wrapping her arms around him so tightly his ribcage groaned. He felt her inhale his scent, the way she'd done with Daniel, and he found himself doing the same thing. He'd missed the smell of her shampoo and that talcum powder she wore. When she looked up at him there were tears in her eyes and dark shadows under them. If he hadn't been so glad to see her he would have had to say she looked like crap. 

"I couldn't do the math, Colonel…"

"Oh, Carter…" He hugged her again and breathed in her hair, then kissed the top of her head. "There wasn't any math to do."

Teal'c was saying something softly to Daniel, something quiet and comforting and when he looked across at him he saw Daniel had tears in his eyes as well. Teal'c took off his jacket and wrapped it around Daniel's shoulders tenderly. As Daniel wriggled into it, swamped by its folds but clearly glad of its warmth. O'Neill saw him sniff it surreptitiously, trying to inhale the proof that this Teal'c was no optical illusion but a three-dimensional familiar friend with an equally familiar scent. Satisfied that the Jaffa was really there, Daniel put his arms around Teal'c and hugged him, saying, "We missed you too, Teal'c. We missed all of you like hell."

Carter disentangled herself from O'Neill's embrace to get the first aid kit but he was touched by the way she was having to wipe the tears of relief from her eyes as she dabbed at his palm with antiseptic and told him this might sting a little, trying to sound so practical but the relief breaking through in that little tremor in her voice. He guessed they really had been missed after all.

Jacob looked between them all and then gave a brief nod. "Okay, kids. I think it's time to go home now." 

As he turned to head for the controls, Daniel said, "No. We need to go back to the island."

O'Neill sighed inwardly because of course in some part of his mind he knew he couldn't really be that simple, not with Daniel in the equation. They couldn't really miss being eaten by sharks by a whisker and a miracle and then just go home, put their feet up, have a beer. Of course they had to go and dance with death again. Carter finished binding his hand and gave Daniel a look of enquiry. "Back to the island, Daniel?"

Jacob was looking at Daniel with that familiar mixture of fondness and exasperation. "The island that's in the process of erupting?"

Daniel had his stubborn face on. "That would be the one."

"The one spewing molten rock into the air high enough to damage this ship if we get within ringing distance?"

"We need to hurry." Daniel wrapped his arms around his body. "The…indigenous population thinks we've gone for help. They're waiting for us to come back and save them."

"Dad." 

Carter gave her father a begging look and Jacob briefly raised his eyes to the stars then hurried for the control deck. Teal'c and Carter went with him, leaving them alone with their doppelgangers. The Jackson kid was gazing at Daniel wistfully, so much sadness in his blue eyes. It was obvious he knew about the relationship with his colonel.

Looking at Daniel, O'Neill flexed his bound hand. "'Indigenous population'?"

Daniel wrinkled his nose in that evasive way he had. "I didn't say they were human."

"You didn't say they weren't either."

Daniel gave him a full on exasperated look. "You want to save them as much as I do, you just don't want to admit it."

"Actually I want to go home, have a beer, and watch a hockey game. With you. Beside me. Alive and in one piece."

"Daniel…?" 

At the call from Jacob both Daniels looked around and then Jackson realized he wasn't being addressed. "I think he means you."

Daniel smiled at him. "I think he does." He touched Jackson tentatively on the shoulder. "Thank you for getting here in time. I really didn't want to die like that." He smiled at the other O'Neill too and the sweetness of it went straight through this O'Neill's heart. The fair-haired Jackson just looked so wistful when his O'Neill looked at this O'Neill's Daniel. As if he could never compete so wasn't even going to try.

"No, he prefers being melted to death by boiling rocks," O'Neill muttered darkly. He couldn't believe Daniel was making them go back to that place when they had damned near broken their backs to escape it just so they _wouldn't_ be there when the volcano erupted. He couldn't believe he had agreed to go back with him. He couldn't believe that Daniel was right and a part of him was desperate to save those damned monkeys. And the snake. He thought of its orange eyes, the smooth scales of its body. Daniel was alive because of that snake, because it had dared him not to touch its tree and O'Neill could never resist a dare.

As O'Neill went to accompany him, the Xerox O'Neill caught his arm. "Look, perhaps we should…"

"And perhaps we shouldn't." O'Neill looked into his eyes, letting him see the depth of resentment in his own. "I doubt we're ever going to agree."

"I never meant to hurt him. I never meant to –"

"But you did, Colonel," O'Neill told him flatly. "And now he's over you. End of story."

The other man rolled his eyes in exasperation. "He was never into me, _Colonel_. You were always the one he –"

"I'm not talking to you about Daniel," he hissed angrily. He looked at the fair-haired Jackson and his heart did turn over, couldn't help it. He was so much the Daniel he'd used to know, who'd scared him silly five times a mission, so stubborn and vulnerable, so smart and dumb and brave and maddening. He looked so young. Christ, no wonder he'd never looked at Daniel as anything except a friend, no wonder he'd taken so long to make a move; the kid looked as if he still needed to have the birds and the bees explained to him. Jackson was looking at the other O'Neill in a way he was damned sure his Daniel had never looked at him, all that hero-worship and adoration and sorrow. If his Daniel had ever looked at him like that he would probably have gone down on one knee and proposed too, but he and Daniel had got married years ago without really knowing it, they'd just forgotten to have sex while in the first flush of discovery about one another. He whispered savagely in the other colonel's ear, "I just hope you treat your Daniel better than you treated mine." He emphasized the 'mine'.

"Colonel, I –" 

"I don't want to hear it." In some part of his mind he knew he was being a little unfair, but he didn't care. He could still see this guy fucking Daniel with such confidence, such practiced skill. A part of him couldn't help wondering how it would have turned out if Casanova here hadn't dumped his Daniel to take up with this adolescent-looking Jackson with his big eyes and floppy hair, who was too inexperienced to know what a piece of work his lying, cheating O'Neill was. He remembered something then and turned on his heel. "Weren't you already married? To a woman? To the mother of your child?" He darted a look at Jackson then, torn between hoping and fearing this would be a revelation to him, but the younger man only bowed his head and looked guilty.

"We got an annulment." The Xerox O'Neill was talking to him in the same way he talked to people with whom he was trying to keep his temper despite gross provocation. "Under Egyptian law it's not difficult to do."

O'Neill looked back at Jackson and felt an eerie sense of loss. This Daniel hadn't been through what his Daniel had. Couldn't have done to still look like that. "What law did you marry your Daniel under?"

He saw them both wince and realized he'd gone too far, was striking out blindly and not caring who he hurt. In his heart he suspected he was probably angry with himself, because he hadn't made the move he should have done, had put his energies into pushing Daniel away because he couldn't deal with his own unadmitted desires, and in the process had pushed him into this guy's arms.

His counterpart put his arm around Jackson's shoulders. "This is forever." He looked O'Neill in the eye, daring him not to read the conviction there, daring him to pretend he didn't know when a Jack O'Neill was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

"Nothing's forever," O'Neill said hoarsely. He thought of the way Daniel had smiled when Sha're had looked at him. Thought of the way he and Sara had been once. Thought of the baby in his crib whom he'd waited to see grow up and who now never would get past the age of ten and an eternity as a photograph. He wondered if his possessions were still where he'd left them. Abruptly he wanted to be home, in his own home, looking at his dead son's face, but this time with Daniel with him, never more than a room away.

"This is." The certainty in the man's eyes surprised him. The guy was looking at Jackson with absolute conviction on his face. He almost wished the kid would look up and see it but the other Daniel was looking after his Daniel.

O'Neill backed up. "You should tell him that." Even as he turned away he knew the other O'Neill did, probably told him every day, Jackson just wasn't hearing him. It occurred to him that he hadn't listened when Daniel had told him he'd never loved the other O'Neill either. He couldn't believe Daniel would have sex with a guy he didn't love, not for the first time, not when he'd never slept with a man before. Why would he? Another part of his mind was telling him patiently that he was thinking like an idiot and that he wouldn't have questioned it if had been a brief fling with a woman under discussion. Daniel had told him how it was from the start, two people who were lonely and who felt themselves undeserving of love meeting up under extraordinary pressure cooker circumstances and taking a chance. The guy had died in front of Daniel. The guy had the same DNA as Daniel's best friend. The guy had been nice to Daniel when no one else was.

He winced inside then. That was probably the major factor in it all. Daniel had been deprived of kindness and deprived of the comforts of touch, and this guy had offered both, and come wrapped in a package so familiar that Daniel had trusted him from the outset. Trusted him so much he'd even let him put his…

No. Couldn't go there. Could never go there. It just made him want to punch out the other O'Neill and then jam his own head into a grinder.

"Jack…!"

He found that he was walking swiftly, not running, refusing to run, but certainly striding at a fair pace in response to that call. This tel'tak seemed indistinguishable from all the others, gold hieroglyphs all over the walls and that shiny dark floor covering on which blood hardly left a trace.

Carter and Teal'c were both hovering close to Daniel, he noticed, close enough to touch, hands on his back and his arm, but he was looking out of the tel'tak. It was a shock to see daylight instead of the endless unfolding of unfamiliar stars. Then he blinked and realized what he was looking at. The island. Their island. The volcano was spewing ash into the air, red veins standing out on the once green mountain, blasted trees lying flat. Yet by the beach it was as it had always been, despite the choking smoke and ash, but the lava was pouring down in molten rivulets, red and black and unstoppable. For the moment it had flowed to each side of their part of the island, to the east and west of where he had built that shelter, where he had sewn up Daniel's wounds with fingers that so very nearly trembled, where they had kissed for the first time. But the lava streams were widening, soon everything was going to be covered by burning blackness, all greenery turned to fire and then to ash.

Daniel gave a little cry and pointed at the beach. "That's our cabin." He turned to look at O'Neill, eyes full of pride and sorrow. "The house that Jack built." It looked tiny down there, like something Charlie might have played with as a child.

Carter was looking at Daniel's face and he realized that she knew everything now without a word being spoken. She said gently, "It's beautiful."

Teal'c gripped his shoulder lightly. "It is indeed a most well constructed dwelling, O'Neill."

O'Neill sensed rather than heard the other two approaching and realized how out of things they must feel, their part done. He still wanted to punch out the other O'Neill but he felt sorry for Jackson.

"There they are." Daniel gripped his arm. 

He followed Daniel's pointing finger and saw them for himself, the golden monkeys on the beach, frantic and desperate as they ran up and down their narrowing strip of sand. The lava was pouring down in two streaks of red, a widening river of red death and they were trapped in between with nowhere to go except into the angry sea.

Jacob gave Daniel a look of only mild exasperation. "Those would be the 'indigenous population' you want me to save?"

Daniel didn't show even a hint of guilt. "They're going to burn to death, Jacob. And we can save them. They trust us."

O'Neill realized with an inner sigh that Daniel not only had not changed but was never going to change. Most people would be grateful that his friends had risked their lives to come and snatch him from the jaws of death, but Daniel just took that for granted and starting looking around for other people for them to save as well. "Sometimes, Daniel…" he murmured.

"What?" Daniel looked at him in what was clearly genuine confusion.

Jackson pressed close, his shyness at being amongst them clearly overwhelmed by his curiosity. Seeing the frantic monkeys his eyes widened. "Can you ring us down there, General Carter?" He had a soft deep voice, very easy on the ear. Daniel's voice, of course, but somehow when he was listening to Daniel, all he could hear was Daniel, not the way his voice sounded.

As Daniel looked at him in surprise, Jackson gave him one of those apologetic wincing smiles O'Neill hadn't seen in a long time. "If they trust you and Colonel O'Neill, they should trust me and Jack too, shouldn't they?"

"Good thinking." Daniel smiled at him and Jackson smiled back. 

O'Neill wondered how when the Daniels had both been fucked by the same guy they could be so cozy with one another when he still wanted to throw his alter ego through a wormhole without a GDO. He was never going to fathom out the way anthropologists reasoned. He looked around for a bag and saw that there were packs stacked against the hull of the ship. Presumably in case some hiking had been needed at the other end if they had been located somewhere the ship couldn't reach without danger. He upended the first pack he came to, scattering medical supplies onto the floor that he would have given his eyeteeth for when Daniel was dying. All that morphine. They must have expected them to be in pretty bad shape. Their last view of Daniel had been of someone riddled with bullet holes, perhaps that was how they had imagined he would still be when they found him again. He glanced across at Carter and saw her looking at Daniel without disguise for a moment, big sister who hadn't kept an eye on little brother the way she was supposed to, who had let him get hurt then let him get lost, raw guilt, raw anxiety. Teal'c looked the same way, glancing across at Daniel, not wanting to move too far away.

O'Neill said, "Daniel, when we ring down there, don't take any stupid risks. Carter and Teal'c didn't bust their balls getting here in time just for you to get fried right in front of them. Okay?"

Daniel gave him a look of surprise then a sloppy salute. "Yes, sir."

Carter's glance was a mixture of gratitude and exasperation. O'Neill winced. "Figure of speech, Carter." Teal'c was also looking at him in that slightly disdainful way he had sometimes. O'Neill rolled his eyes. "I know she's a girl."

"Of course you do, sir," Carter sighed. She nodded to her father. "You'd better work the rings again, Dad." 

Teal'c nodded. "I can keep the ship in stationary orbit."

O'Neill realized for the first time that it was a little odd that Jacob had been the one to greet them. "Problem with the ring mechanism?"

Jacob shrugged. "Nothing I can't handle."

He didn't like the sound of that but they were over the beach now and Daniel was tugging at his arm saying 'Come _on_ , Jack." He was aware of their doppelgangers following them, Jackson grabbing some food out of a pack as he passed it and breaking it in two, handing half to his lawfully wedded dickhead. The guy who not only had everything but had _had_ everyone: Daniel, Sha're, Jackson. The guy who got to keep his child and his lover and still be considered a hero. Who wasn't going to have to hand in his resignation when he got to the SGC.

Then they were standing within that circle on the deck and the rings were descending, light enveloping them, before they were deposited on the beach breathing air so singed it inflamed the throat and every lungful of oxygen came with an eruption tax of burning ash.

 

Daniel had barely crouched down and called them before the monkeys were running for him, the younger ones trying to climb inside his shirt. They didn't seem fazed by there being two of everyone, too busy fleeing the burning lava and seeing the humans as the only way out. O'Neill thought he had time. Maybe it was crazy but he felt a sense of obligation. He could see the flow of the lava and it wasn't at all as he'd imagined it. He'd thought it would be dramatic and beautiful but it was just dirty and hot, the island bleeding to death from slashed veins of molten rock, all greenness turned to ashy gray and blackened red. He ran, the heat wrapping itself around him, like being next to an open oven door when a roast was cooking. His eyes watered from the soot and ash, grime sticking to his sweat-covered skin. No parrots or gulls calling. He hoped they were long gone. He heard Daniel call him and shouted to him to get the monkeys onto the ship, he wouldn't be long. Only as he dived into the jungle did he realize the words shouted hadn't been 'Jack' but 'Colonel O'Neill', that it was the fair-haired Jackson who had noticed he'd gone, who, if he died in this jungle would have caught that final glimpse of him, not the Daniel he loved.

As he ran he could hear the sound of trunks toppling, the crack and mournful pause of the fall before they hit the shrubs below, the ominous clamor of something moving through the undergrowth. It sounded like a huge animal crashing its way heedlessly past the trees, a monster awoken. If he closed his eyes he could imagine it was a dragon pursuing him, the smell of singed leaves and singed flesh, the soot and ash darkening the day, the way the jungle moved aside to let it pass. He could almost picture the leathery wings beating against the heated air, its jaws opening to let loose another blast of fire. He didn't know if a dragon was more or less terrifying than the implacable power of a lava stream in full molten flow.

He ran for the tree, not looking back, needing to do this, a risk he had to take. The bark was pale and the leaves delicate, pale green, a faint sap oozing from them. The tree of life indeed. And there was the snake. With no means of escaping, nowhere for a creature that could not fly or swim or burrow to go to, it had stayed put. He looked into its orange eyes and saw nothing at all that told him whether or not it was intending to bite him or understood that he was here to help. But it didn't try to escape when he picked it up. Its body was much longer and heavier than he had expected and he held it gingerly, one hand behind the head in the hope it might prevent it biting him, the other clasped around its thick warm body as awkwardly as a schoolboy at his first dance, feet of tail dangling which he tried to support with one twanging knee. Although the snake opened its mouth and he saw the curve of its fangs, it only seemed to be warning him to be careful. He lowered it into the pack he'd snatched from the tel'tak and grabbed a handful of leaves, twigs, bark, and flowers, pushing that in on top of it. It nestled in the bottom of the pack, a heavy weight, but it made no attempt to escape. As he ran back towards the beach, the fire monster closer now, belching more smoke and flame, he saw lizards, beautiful and panicked, and grabbed those too, none of them attempting to evade him now. He shoved green and purple and multi-colored reptiles of varying sizes into the pack, staggered from the weight, and ran on. Would the snake eat them? Were they poisonous? Would they kill each other? None of them seemed to be moving when he shoved the next one in on top, just a quiet scramble for some dignity amongst the other heaving bodies. A red and yellow frog jumped onto a tree trunk right in front of him and he grabbed that too and tossed it into the sack. He'd never been a naturalist but this was different somehow, this had been his home too, his paradise. In some bone-deep part of himself he was devastated by this eruption, wanted to be gone before the lava incinerated the home he had built while Daniel was dying and in which they had later made all that sweet love. So he knew how these creatures felt in their angry bewilderment, their disbelief as the burning rock poured down the mountainside and destroyed everything in its wake. How could the jungle, that had been so verdant and thriving and full of life, now be this place of ash and fire and smoke and lava? He grabbed another lizard, and as he picked up its heavy green body another jumped onto his arm, tiny and jewel-like. Both were shoved unceremoniously into the pack.

As he reached the beach, he heard Daniel screaming his name and the monkeys screaming with him. Carter had ringed down too, the monkeys so panicked they seemed unaware this person was a stranger. The fair-haired Jackson was offloading his monkeys onto Carter, untangling their fingers from his jacket and transferring them to her.

"Jack…? Jack…!"

Nothing wrong with Daniel's lungs. "I'm here!" He shouted back. "Just keep doing what you're doing, damnit. Let's get out of here."

He saw Daniel turn, and the relief on his face, and ran faster, even though his back and knees were already aching, the weight of the pack astonishing, the straps digging into his shoulder. How could reptiles be so heavy? Daniel was a mass of clinging monkeys, their black fingers twisted into his hair and clothing, their golden fur standing up like cat fur in their anxiety. He could see the lava pouring down now, beyond the place where Jacob was keeping the tel'tak hovering, one stream was already crawling across the beach, black and red and twisting the air above it to a warped heat haze. There was a puff of flame and he saw a coconut palm burning as its trunk was enveloped by the lava flow, a coconut falling into the glutinous red puddle of molten rock disfiguring the once golden sands. Still running as fast as he could with a bag full of reptiles weighing him down, he blundered across the sand, blinking ash from his eyes, to the place where Daniel, Carter, and the wrong O'Neill were waiting for him. 

As he reached them, the rings dropped and there was that brief sensation of being caged. The other O'Neill looked around. "Where's Daniel?" O'Neill also looked around in confusion but there was only one Daniel standing there, the short-haired one he loved. As the visiting O'Neill made to move, Carter grabbed him and held onto him. He was still yelling at her to let him go as the rings whisked them up into the darkness of the tel'tak.

 

The other Daniel Jackson, the one from this dimension who had spent so many weeks on this now erupting island paradise, had told him there were thirteen monkeys in the troupe. Daniel didn't need to be Sam to work out they were one monkey short. The other Daniel had been casting around for the missing one, a female he'd said, shyer than the rest, probably because she was pregnant, but he'd also been desperate to get the scrambling panicking monkeys he'd already collected into the safety of the tel'tak. Logically, as someone who resembled the person the missing monkey trusted, Daniel reasoned that left finding the missing monkey up to him. Just as the rings had been about to descend, he had caught sight of a flash of golden fur and immediately offloaded his collection of monkeys onto Major Carter and taken off in pursuit. 

Perhaps 'pursuit' wasn't quite the right word, as catching her was out of the question unless she consented to let herself be caught. It was more about persuasion, cajoling and convincing her that she really was better off with a strange human than on this once-familiar but now burning world.

She was just ahead of him, jumping from tree to tree, her body hunched awkwardly in a way that made him wonder if she was hurt. 

"I promise I won't hurt you," he called softly. She looked over her shoulder at him and for a moment he thought she was going to come towards him, then a palm tree was uprooted by the lava burning through its trunk and fell with a crash. Panicked by the violence of it, she leapt on to the next tree and he followed her, talking in as low and soothing a tone as he could muster when the air was a flurry of ash all around him. The heat was terrifying, as was the destruction: the blasted trees on the mountainside and the dirty red river of lava advancing at a speed that made the heart catch and falter.

"Please trust me…" Daniel breathed in despair. He jumped a lava stream, the heat from it searing, and landed on a patch of vegetation under the tree in which she was sheltering. There was a rush of burning air as undergrowth caught alight all around them. The monkey gazed down at him from between soot-flecked green leaves, her golden fur speckled with ash, anxiety in her dark eyes. He saw something move against her body, a squirming flex of drying fur, and realized she was holding a baby, that she must have given birth sometime in the last hour or so while her world was going up in flames all around her. The smoke was thick now, like mist on a fall morning, gusting between the trees while the fire crackled and the lava slowly engulfed everything in its path. As a bush began to burn a few feet from him, butterflies flew past in a panicked cloud of iridescent blue and purple. A seared breeze blew another wave of flame before him and he barely jerked his head away in time, transfixed, he saw a tardy butterfly glow with flame, its wings alight, and then it was singed and dead and ugly as it dropped into the lava flow now uncomfortably close to his ankles.

"Please…" He held out his hands to her, willing her with everything he had to trust him and just jump. She cast around in despair, looking for vanished relatives, once-green trees, the world she had always known, but he was all there was left that she even slightly recognized. As another tree fell against the one on which she sat, showering her and Daniel with a fall of burning leaves, she jumped and he felt the secure warmth of her thump against his chest. Briefly closing his eyes in relief, he wrapped his jacket around her and her infant. As he did so a small green lizard landed on his shoulder. Shoving it hastily into his pocket, he looked around for the way he had come – except the beach he had sprinted down was a lake of fire now, red-black lava seeping into a steaming sea. He turned the other way and found another stream of lava had poured down to cut him off. With nowhere else to go, he headed for the sea, barely getting his foot onto a fallen trunk to use as bridge across a lava stream before it burst into flames, and ducking under another tree only a moment before it crashed down onto the lava. As the sand crunched under his boots, he felt relief, blinking soot from his eyes while the ash whirled around his head like a gray blizzard on a winter day, but as he stepped to the right he saw the lava rippling towards him. It looked like a living thing, some creature whose veins ran with fire, barely contained within a magma skin. The jungle was a wreckage of burning trees, the land discolored by burning rivers of fiery rock, the broken Stargate was already engulfed by the flow. Around the sweep of the once-golden beach he guessed the cabin that Colonel O'Neill had built for his Daniel Jackson would be a blazing ruin now. Paradise lost indeed. 

The lava was sweeping towards him, the two streams mingling into one spreading lake. As he backed toward the sea, the cloud of butterflies gathered around his head. They, like him, seemed to have nowhere else to go. When he turned his head to judge how far away was the sea, he saw the lava had cut him off. There was just a small patch of beach left now, with fiery rock oozing toward him from all sides.

"I'm sorry, Jack." He closed his eyes and felt the wings of the butterflies beat gently against his skin, felt the heat of the lava flow all around him as it lapped against his toes.

Then there was a 'thunk' of something dropping around him and he looked up in surprise to see the dark hull of the tel'tak overhead. He was still gazing at the ship when he was abruptly whisked up into the darkness of the ship in a blur of Tok'ra technology and confused butterflies.

 

O'Neill listened to his doppelganger screaming at the fair-haired Jackson and felt an unexpected sense of identification. The way the guy had been climbing up the walls of the tel'tak and telling Jacob to just open the goddamned cargo hold and let him jump as Jacob wrestled with the contrary ring mechanism had really taken him by surprise. He had it fixed in his mind that this guy was a phony, so the raw terror in his voice and the panic in his eyes had come as something of a shock to him. His Daniel had stood there self-hugging and rocking in anxiety as he willed Jacob to get the rings to work. Carter had been on her knees helping Jacob as her father shot out rapid instructions O'Neill could barely follow but which she seemed to understand. Looking at Daniel had been strange, seeing the man he loved looking at a man who looked just like him, oblivious to everything except the fate of that missing Jackson. That was when he had realized that rightly or wrongly, Daniel thought his ex-lover was in love with the guy down on that burning island. Was all twisted up with anxiety at the thought of any harm befalling that imperilled Daniel because he didn't think the ranting O'Neill would survive it. 

"Please! Just give me a fucking rope!"

Then the rings had dropped, that strange sound they made, metallic and yet not truly mechanical. It had taken him years to realize that what they reminded him of was the kind of technology you saw only in science fiction movies. A moment later Jackson had been whisked back onto the tel'tak in a glow of light and clatter of rings. They dropped away to reveal him standing there with smoking boots, a monkey in his arms, a lizard on his shoulder and a cloud of blue butterflies flittering around his head. O'Neill thought he looked like fair-haired Snow White. That was when the other O'Neill had started screaming at him, and it had been a strange thing, but O'Neill had found himself sympathizing not with the open-mouthed big eyed Jackson looking around the tel'tak as if he'd never seen it before, clearly completely taken aback at being yelled at, but with the half-out-of-his-mind-with-terror-and-relief O'Neill doing the yelling. So, he stood there watching it dispassionately and thinking that, yes, this was what falling in love with Daniel Jackson did to you: it shot your nerves to hell.

"What were you _thinking_ …?"

The fair-haired Jackson possessed that exasperating mixture of stubbornness, self-possession, and reproach that was also his Daniel's trademark. He wordlessly put the monkey in his yelling lover's arms – a smart move, O'Neill had to admit, as it prevented the ranting colonel from taking a swing at him – and then said in mild reproof: "I was thinking I didn't want her and her baby to burn to death, Jack. What were you thinking?" 

That was so damned typical, he had to admit. So matter-of-fact and quiet when he had been the one taking the insane risk. As if nothing could be more unreasonable than the guy yelling at him. Did Daniel Jacksons learn this stuff at their mother's knee in every dimension or was it just that they all purchased their Acme O'Neill Manipulation Kits the day after that hapless colonel fell into their web?

"I was thinking you were going to fucking die while I had to sit here and watch it happen!"

Jackson gave a long-suffering sigh. "But I didn't die, Jack, and neither did she or her baby, so it all worked out for the best, didn't it?"

"No thanks to you! For Christ's sake, Daniel, your boots are _smoking_! That's how close the lava came to killing you"

"Good point." Jackson held up a finger. "And if you'd just stop yelling for a few minutes perhaps I could take my smoking boots off before I lose my toes. If that's okay with you? And stop shouting – you'll frighten the baby. Oh, and can you hold this a minute?" Jackson took the lizard from his shoulder and slipped it gently into his O'Neill's jacket pocket, smiled at the monkey, stroked the baby delicately on its still-wet head with his fingertip then began to unlace his boots.

O'Neill shook his head in disbelief. Yep, in every universe apparently Daniel Jackson managed to have the last word even when he was so damned wrong he could hardly be any wronger if he took the wrong road to Wrongsville and got a doctorate in Wronging.

O'Neill watched his doppelganger slide down the wall, still with the monkey in his arms, to end up on his seat, running a shaky hand through his hair. Unable to stop himself, O'Neill crouched down next to him then pointed at his own silver hair.

"Take a good hard look at your future, Colonel. Give it six months and this is going to be what you see in the mirror every morning."

"You could have warned me." The lizard jumped from his shoulder and scuttled off around the side of the ship, the butterflies were still hovering over Jackson who was now peeling off his smoking socks to reveal pale pink toes, mercifully unscathed. It was strange to see Daniel's feet on someone else, the same elegant shape and long toes. The kind of feet that made you want to pour Southern Comfort over them and start sucking…. He collected himself with an effort as his Daniel walked over to sit down next to the visiting one. They looked good together, he had to admit, Daniel past and present in earnest consultation, both of them alive and well and looking appetizing enough to eat. And, even better, there wasn't a shark in sight.

"I figured you had it coming."

The other man shrugged. "I guess I should have known. Your boy was pretty much a heart-attack-on-a-stick, and I think mine is worse." There was a slight emphasis on that 'mine' which O'Neill recognized from his earlier comment. There was just something about Daniel that brought out the jealous Neanderthal in the guys who fell for him, and he supposed that had always been a part of their relationship. There wasn't a single woman who had kissed Daniel that he had felt warm fuzzies about in the past, probably as good an indicator as any that he was a little conflicted in his feelings about his best friend. So he heard and understood that 'back off – you've got your own Daniel so keep the hell away from mine' vibe from his alternative dimension counterpart.

"Mine's obedience trained," O'Neill shrugged. "Yours seems to have a little trouble with that whole 'following orders' thing." He winced as a monkey tugged his hair and looked up to see that the troupe had come to liberate their lost member. They were still huddling together a lot more than usual but some of them had food in their hands which looked suspiciously like Powerbars and USAF crackers. He suspected Carter had been feeding them, she was another soft touch, just like Daniel.

The visiting O'Neill lifted the mother and baby up onto the gold-paneled seating the monkeys were running around. "Bullshit. I was on a mission with your Daniel, remember, and he was about as obedience trained as a toddler on speed. He just ducks faster than mine does."

O'Neill watched as the other monkeys fussed over their returning member, one immediately starting to groom her while the females began what he would have had to term 'cooing' over the new infant. He suspected monkey babies were about as spoilt as a baby could get. Although he had no intention of saying it aloud he couldn't help thinking that if Jackson was even slower to duck than Daniel, then his life expectancy was looking a little on the short side.

"So. Are we…okay?" His doppelganger made a caution motion of the hand between their chests. "You and me, I mean?"

O'Neill looked him in the eye. "I am never going to forgive you for using _my_ Daniel as a place to keep your dick warm while you got up the courage to ask your Daniel out…"

"You know, I sensed that about you."

"But I am grateful you zapped Daniel with that tracer thing and that you helped save our lives."

The other man wrinkled his nose. "Well, that's…gracious. For an O'Neill, I mean. I figured I was going to have to sleep with one eye open or something while we were on the same tel'tak."

O'Neill shrugged. "So much as look at my Daniel in a way other than fraternal and sleeping with both eyes open won't save your balls going AWOL. Do I make myself clear?"

"Well, you're not being exactly subtle so the message is hard to miss."

"…And then there was that mission you went on to the planet where the occupants seemed to be descended from a Hittite culture. Can you tell me something about that?"

They both turned to look at the two Daniels, the fair-haired Jackson now barefoot and having his toes tugged at curiously by a young monkey, the properly-shod Daniel positively festooned in thumb-sucking golden-furred creatures trying to burrow inside his clothes for comfort.

Jackson darted Daniel a sideways look, a tentative smile flickering across his pale features. "You know so much about our missions."

"Some of them, yes. I certainly heard _all_ about the time you persuaded that chief to sign the peace agreement with that rival tribe and give the SGC first rights on the naquada mine in exchange for medical care and food. Not to mention your bawling out the USAF for putting milk powder in the aid bags. I've been complaining about that for years."

"It's this Western Culture everyone has clean water out of a tap mindset that's so hard to deal with. I keep telling them how many babies are dead in developing countries from wrongheaded corporations doling out their powdered baby milk…" Jackson broke off to frown. "You must have a good memory to remember all those details from someone else's missions."

"Not really." Daniel gave him a rueful smile. "It was just all your colonel ever talked about."

"Our missions?"

Daniel half-laughed. "You." He looked the other Jackson in the eye. "All he ever talked about was…you."

Although his heart gave a little catch at the brittle way Daniel smiled there, O'Neill couldn't help thinking that was a very nice thing his other half had just done. Just another reminder of why he loved this guy so much.

Jackson gazed at Daniel for a moment in confusion, then he ducked his head to hide a pleased little smile. O'Neill saw him dart a glance in their direction, trying to see if it was true as he caught his own colonel's eye. Given the doting way the guy was looking at him he evidently saw what he was looking for. It took him a moment to stop grinning with relief and get his face back under control before saying to Daniel: "That must have been fun for you."

"Oh, it was." Daniel nodded. "Made me feel so special, as you can imagine."

O'Neill felt the man sitting next to him give a little jolt of disagreement, an inarticulate sound broken off, a resistance of body language, but at a darted look from O'Neill and Daniel, he ducked his head and submitted to this version of the truth. Under his breath he murmured to O'Neill, "I did care for him. I do care for him. I just…"

"…Love the Daniel you married better?" O'Neill shrugged. "I wouldn't sweat it. My Daniel loves me better than he loves you too."

"I know that." The guy sounded positively exasperated. "That's the other half of the reason why I broke up with him. We both knew you were the one he loved. Just like we both knew my Daniel was the one I loved. We were just…"

"Too chickenshit to tell the people you were in love with how you felt?"

The guy seemed to take umbrage at that, not so much on his behalf as on Daniel's. "Well, in my case there was a lot riding on it and I had a lousy track record, but I never got the impression the object of Doc's affections was making it any too easy for him to tell him how he felt – probably because he was too busy being an insensitive prick in denial of his true feelings. Tell me, Colonel, how was life in the closet anyway? Didn't the smell of mothballs get you down after a while?"

"I think I'd rather be a little confused about my orientation than fucking everything with a pulse."

"Your loss, Colonel, because as far as I can see we both got to be confused but you also got to be celibate whereas I got to have lots and lots of really good sex…."

"Well, whoopee-doo for you, and God forbid a colonel in the United States Air Force should have his mind on anything higher than groin level…"

"Could you two – oh I don't know – maybe _stop_ pawing the ground for five minutes?"

They both looked up guiltily as Daniel loomed over them, a monkey in each arm. Jackson stood next to him, fair hair in his eyes, arms folded. They both looked very pretty, O'Neill thought, but he couldn't deny they also looked pretty pissed.

Jackson gave his O'Neill a withering look. "There are actually grown-ups trying to have a conversation in this tel'tak, Jack – which is a little difficult with you two making all that noise. And General Carter wants to talk to Colonel O'Neill."

 _Hey, what do you know, Daniel Jacksons are waspish little smartasses the universe over._ But O'Neill said nothing aloud. The barefoot Jackson reminded him too much of the way his own Daniel had been when he'd first met him, and exasperating as the kid undoubtedly was, he was also someone about whom it was impossible not to feel protective. So, like so many times in the past, he just got to his feet and did as he was told. As he reached Jacob it occurred to him that Daniel and Jackson were probably comparing notes on how obedience trained _their_ other halves were. Damn. All these years of thinking he was Petruchio and now it was looking suspiciously as if he might be Kate after all. That really sucked.

"You wanted to talk to me?"

Jacob looked over his shoulder at him. "What do you want me to do with the menagerie?"

"Find somewhere like our island, I guess, where they can live a free and happy life."

"There are laws about moving flora and fauna from one landmass to another, you know, Jack. You can cause irreversible harm to the ecosystem if you start playing fast and loose with that kind of thing. Look at Australia and New Zealand and what the introduction of rats and cats did to their indigenous species."

"It wasn't my idea to play Noah's Ark." That had sounded whiney, but he was feeling whiney right now.

Checking around to see that his daughter and Teal'c weren't in earshot, Jacob said quietly, "You are so Dannywhipped, Jack."

O'Neill opened his mouth to retort then pulled a face instead. "The other O'Neill is worse."

"Granted." Jacob inclined his head. "Colonel O'Neill is positively embarrassing, but you're not much better."

O'Neill rolled his eyes. "So what do you want me to do? Throw the animals out of an airlock?"

As one of the monkeys scampered along the controls, Jacob sighed like a saint whose patience had been tested beyond endurance. "This is a ship made using technology so advanced the human race can only guess at how it functions. It's not meant to be lubricated with monkey guano." The monkey examined Jacob for a moment with its head on one side and then sprang onto his shoulder and began to tug and twist at his ear.

O'Neill hurried to remove the monkey from the other man's shoulder, the monkey clinging on determinedly and shrieking at O'Neill like a toddler having a temper tantrum. He yanked it off at last and it smacked his face then grabbed his hair in retaliation, giving it a tug so hard it made his eyes water.

"Jack, what are you doing?" Daniel demanded. "Don't be so rough with him."

"Hey, I didn't pull his hair!"

Daniel made soft cooing noises to the monkey and it immediately became docile and penitent, holding out black-palmed hands to Daniel in obvious 'rescue me from the big bad colonel' body language. Daniel held out his arms and the monkey leapt onto his chest, clinging to his jacket and giving Jack a malicious look of triumph over its shoulder. It rubbed its head against Daniel's jaw and made little chirruping sounds. Daniel stroked it gently and gave O'Neill a look of reproach.

He held up his hands in protest. "The little monster mugged Jacob and then was starting to beat the crap out of me!" Jacob shook his head beside him and O'Neill was almost certain he heard the word 'Dannywhipped' murmured again. Raising his eyes to heaven he glared at Daniel. "Maybe you'd like to bring your mind to bear on the problem of what we do with them next, Doctor Dolittle?"

"It would be very unusual to only have one island in the middle of the ocean. It should be part of a chain and the others should have comparative ecological conditions."

"Erupting volcanoes, you mean?"

Daniel did one of his reaching-for-the-last-of-my-patience sighs. "Do you really want a lecture on the way volcanic island chains and atolls are formed and function? Because Sam and I are quite happy to talk about plate tectonics and hot spots until you beg for mercy."

"'Hot spots'?" He couldn't help it, he was now staring at Daniel and remembering exactly how he looked lying on his back with his legs raised just so while O'Neill drove into him at exactly the right angle to make him moan. And he hadn't been the one doing the begging for mercy back then, no, that had been all Daniel. He licked his lips, feeling the sudden dryness of his mouth.

Carter appearing suddenly at his elbow made him jump. "They're what geologists call the places within the earth's mantle that have a stationary plume of magma rising from them. The magma partially melts the overriding plate and that causes –"

"Carter." He rested a gentle hand on her arm. "Don't think I don't love you because I really do, but I still couldn't give a bent horseshoe nail about magma."

Daniel stroked the monkey's golden head. "Stop being a smartass then or you get the whole lecture."

"Just tell me if there's likely to be anywhere around here where we can offload the damned monkeys!"

"Land ahoy!" 

They all turned to look at Jacob. Teal'c raised an eyebrow. "I am unfamiliar with that term, General Carter."

"That was a monkey on your shoulder, Jacob, not a parrot," O'Neill pointed out helpfully.

Jacob pointed ahead. "Do you all want to keep bitching about my choice of words or take a look at the landmass?"

It was large, possibly an island or possibly the edge of a whole continent, it was hard to tell from their position, but it was certainly beautiful looking. The way their island had looked before it had exploded in a shower of angry ash and burning rock, only much, much bigger. The sea was turquoise here, the beaches pale gold. It looked like their island had looked when he'd first woken up there, with gulls diving the incoming tide to snatch up shrimp and fish. This place was clearly far enough away that the ash hadn't reached here, or else just in the other direction from the way the wind was blowing, whatever the reason it seemed completely untouched.

"It looks beautiful," Carter offered.

Daniel still had a monkey in his arms. "What if there are poachers here? What if there are animals that eat monkeys? They're not used to predators and we've taught them to trust humans."

As Jacob took the ship over the landmass they could see that it was mostly tropical forest, looking very similar to the world the monkeys were used to. Coconut palms on the long empty beaches and a tangle of wet warm jungle. They flew low enough to see waterfalls tumbling in silver streams from high peaks and eagles wheeling. It seemed unlikely that a land so teeming with fertility did not have fruit in abundance. But the monkey Daniel was carrying burrowed into his chest in a way that suggested it was very comfortable where it was.

"They're wild animals," O'Neill told him sternly. "They need to be in the wild."

"I know." Daniel peered intently at the jungle. "I just wish there was some way of knowing if they'd be safe here."

"I see habitation that appears to be human." Teal'c pointed and they all followed his finger to see what he had seen: the silvery domes of some modern-looking building constructed in a circle of see-through walkways leading from one low domed tower and the next. 

"It looks like a laboratory." Carter peered at it intently. "Like a biosphere or something."

Jacob looked at O'Neill. "Want to put down?"

O'Neill thought of the weapons they carried and nodded. "Okay. But the first sign of trouble and I expect you to get us out of here. Teal'c…?"

The big Jaffa nodded. "I will remain on board to take the controls so that General Carter can ring you back onto the ship at the first sign of trouble."

At the thought of having to confront other human beings, O'Neill began to feel a little self-conscious. Looking down at his ragged and stained clothing, he became aware of the way he smelled so strongly of sea, sweat, and too much sunshine on unwashed skin. Daniel seemed to be thinking the same thing as he scraped his fingers through his hair ineffectually and then quietly asked Carter if she had brought a t-shirt for him.

Carter obligingly found a t-shirt for Daniel, giving him an encouraging smile as she held it out. He had to put down the monkey to put it on. No sooner had he put the creature on the floor of the tel'tak than it ran back up him again and O'Neill rolled his eyes but heroically forbore from commenting. Even with the eager-fingered help of the monkey, Daniel managed to wriggle his way into a t-shirt and then back into Teal'c's jacket but it didn't help much. He still looked in need of a shave and his hair was sun-bleached and untidy. Scratching his own unshaven jaw and feeling his once-short hair tickling his ears, O'Neill suspected he was looking a little less than military issue himself. In fact he suspected that he and Daniel both looked – and smelled – like two guys who had spent the last few months on an island that didn't have soap or hot water. Carter was more presentable as at least her clothing was clean and had seen an iron in the past few days but she was too skinny and the shadows under her eyes were scary. The Jackson kid was barefoot, still looked about seventeen to O'Neill, and the way his fair hair was in his eyes coupled with his mouth breathing gave him a distinctly available-by-the-hour appearance. Groaning inwardly, O'Neill had to admit that a team apparently consisting of two smelly hermits, a crack whore, and a rent boy might not give exactly the right impression to the humans down there. Annoyingly, the other O'Neill was the only one of them who actually looked like a suitable representative of the United States Air Force. 

"Let's just take one monkey for now." Daniel pushed the one he was carrying inside the jacket Teal'c had lent him. "Find out if they're nice people first."

Forbearing to point out that even if they were vivisectionists they were unlikely to tell Daniel that, O'Neill nodded. He took the gun Teal'c handed him, checked that the clip was full and then holstered it. When he looked up he found two sets of big blue eyes looking at him in disapproval and glared between the two Daniel Jacksons in annoyance. "I don't go anywhere unarmed if I can help it."

"Would that include the bathroom?" Daniel enquired mildly.

O'Neill gave him what he sincerely hoped was a withering glare but Daniel looked resolutely unwithered. Jackson wrinkled his nose in mild disdain but said nothing aloud. Pointedly checking the ammo in his own revolver, the other O'Neill said, "You two stay behind us. Okay?"

Jackson rolled his eyes. "Because we're the anthropologists trained in meeting and greeting and you're the shoot-em-up guys? Yes, that makes perfect sense."

O'Neill looked at his doppelganger. "Do you have any kind of control over your Daniel? Because if so it would be nice if you could exert it round about now." 

"Control your own Daniel," the man retorted.

The two Daniels exchanged of look of total sympathy with one another. Clearly here was the only other person they would ever meet who would fully understand the nature of the burden they carried. 

"When you're ready." Jacob looked between them with no discernible patience. "Don't rush yourselves or anything. There's nothing I like better than having to play fifth wheel to a good domestic quarrel."

That shut them all up very effectively and with Carter staring straight ahead so neither of the two ranking officers could see her smirk, they ringed down to the shiny silver modernity of the alien laboratory.

 

O'Neill had to admit that Daniel was right. Again. Sometimes when you arrived with guns in your hands looking military, people did get a little…scared of you. The laboratory they'd ringed down into was shiny enough with various instruments bleeping and a wall of small screens like a hi-tech security outpost, but the two scientists could hardly have looked less dangerous if they'd tried. They were young men, one dark, one fair, both wearing shorts, sandals, and t-shirts, and both very obviously unarmed. They were talking on some kind of communication device as the rings disappeared.

"People. Yes, here. Oh shit. Make that armed people. No, stay where you are. I'll leave the radio open – "

Then at a jerk of the gun from the other O'Neill, the fair-haired guy, who had been speaking so rapidly into the communications panel, stepped back with his hands in the air. O'Neill noticed the way the dark-haired guy moved forward to put himself between the blond and his gun.

"Hi," the dark-haired guy spoke evenly, holding his hands up. "As you can see we're not armed or dangerous."

Daniel stepped in front of O'Neill's gun in a way that made it clear that he wasn't going to let a little thing like getting shot to pieces affect the habits of a lifetime. "Hi. I'm Daniel Jackson. We're sorry to gatecrash your lab. This is Major Samantha Carter. Colonel O'Neill. Jack and…Doctor Jackson."

"Are you twins?" The dark-haired one looked between them suspiciously. "Or are you from a place with cloning?"

"We're kind of twins." Jackson looked at Daniel and shrugged. "We're sort of the same people but not. It's to do with quantum theory and dimensional parallels and…stuff."

Carter had her mouth open to explain when the fair-haired guy said, "Is that a Patterson Monkey?" His voice trembled a little as if he could hardly dare to hope.

"What?" The dark-haired guy wheeled around to look at Daniel accusingly. "Where did you get that from? Don't you know they're a protected species? You have no right to –"

"Kalen, it's not tagged." The fair-haired guy had that look of suppressed excitement Daniel got when he found new chicken scratchings in a dusty tomb. He picked up an instrument from the panel next to him and, oblivious of Carter shadowing him with her P-90, waved it slowly. "No reading. No tag. Not one of ours."

"What?" The hard look vanished from the dark-haired Kalen's face at once, like a true believer getting his first look at the Grail. He swallowed hard, searching Daniel's face. "Did you find it here or…?"

"On another island." Daniel kept stroking the monkey's head. "On your world is this a species that's…?"

"One of the ten most endangered, yes." Kalen held out his hands then put them back by his sides. "I'm sorry…this is a little too much to take in. I mean… Another island? Around here?"

"About four hundred miles from here," Carter told him.

"It erupted," O'Neill explained helpfully. 

Daniel said: "It may have been called 'Tanui-ike' by the people who used to live there."

"I knew it!" Kalen stabbed the communications button. "Christabel? Tenanye? Did you hear that? The damned military wouldn't let us go there and all the time there were Patterson Monkeys there!"

There was a crackle back from two excited female voices in a language O'Neill didn't understand.

"It was about to erupt." Colonel O'Neill put his gun away. "So, your military were probably just trying to stop you getting crispy-fried."

"We'd have been fine." The fair-haired one dismissed the possibility of danger with a shrug, gaze still fixed on the monkey in Daniel's arms. "I'm Anwar, by the way. Can I…? Is he…? Is it a he or a she by the way…?"

"Definitely a 'he'," O'Neill assured him. "If you don't watch him he tries to stick his dick in your ear. I always thought that was just part of a comedy routine when Richard Pryor said his monkeys did that, but it _so_ wasn't."

"Jack…" Daniel gave him one of those reproving looks he saved just for him. "He's an adolescent. He's going through changes."

"Hey, I was an adolescent once. I still never stuck my dick in anyone's ear."

Kalen was also gazing at the monkey as if it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. "A female would have been too much to hope for but even a male is an incredible find. Is he hurt? Does he need medical care?"

"He's fine." Daniel smiled at them gently. "They're all fine."

Anwar hit a button to show them something playing on one of the screens. Golden-haired black-faced monkeys were swinging from tree to tree in a way that was very familiar. "This is our troupe. They're at the south end of the island at the moment. Christa and Tenanye are monitoring them because one of the females is pregnant for the first time and we need to know she has the baby okay. There are ten of them, and as far as we knew they were the last ten Patterson Monkeys alive anywhere on the planet. The history of these islands is enough to break a conservationist's heart. There was terrible exploitation here because of the Eden trees and their benefit to medicine and then, of course, there was the whole Natana flower drug harvest thing, and the wildlife was slaughtered by the people harvesting the Eden bark and the Natana flowers. They ate everything, and because the Patterson Monkeys are so curious and fearless they ate those first. By the time the world woke up to the wreckage that had been wreaked in this place, several islands had been lost to volcanic eruptions and the wildlife was decimated by three centuries of human intervention. This whole area is a wildlife preserve now and everything is tagged and monitored so any poacher would be wasting their time as we'd know where the animal was straight away."

Kalen was staring at Daniel as if mesmerized. Very carefully, as if afraid the words might bite him, he said, "'All'? You said 'all'?"

"All the monkeys in the troupe." Daniel pointed at the ceiling. "They're on the ship."

Anwar's jaw dropped. "How…how many?"

"Thirteen."

Jackson looked up. "Fourteen. Remember the baby?"

"Oh yes." Daniel nodded. "Fourteen. Eight females and six males. All healthy."

"Oh my God." Anwar sat down suddenly. 

Kalen rested a hand on his shoulder, patting him reassuringly. "Put your head between your knees."

O'Neill looked across at Daniel and had to admit that the boy had done good. Again. And he was getting to smile in a way Daniel didn't get to smile anything like often enough. He was feeling pretty damned good himself.

"So, they'll be safe here, right?" He looked between Anwar and Kalen. "We can leave the monkeys with you and you'll make sure they're okay?"

Anwar looked up. "You're…happy to do that?"

"Sure." O'Neill shrugged. "We just want them to have a good life. If you can guarantee that…?"

"I promise you they'll have a good life," Kalen said fervently. "The island is about a hundred thousand square miles of protected animal paradise."

"That's about the size of California," Carter observed. "Or New Zealand."

"…It has mountains, tropical rainforest, sandy beaches, glaciers, and fjords. Every environment in one package. It's an internationally protected nature reserve for endangered and indigenous species. Anwar, where are the information packs?" 

O'Neill found a printed pamphlet pushed into his hand by the fair-haired Anwar. "There are only the four of us humans here," the young man explained. "It really is a paradise for the animals that live here."

"No tourism?" Jackson enquired.

Kalen shook his head. "Not here. They go to Okoluna. That's about six times the size of the Island and the species there are off the danger list. The money from the tourism there pays for this place with plenty to spare."

Carter had shouldered her gun to examine the screens and instrumentation curiously, she and Jackson murmuring to one another quietly as they read from wallcharts and looked at data. She looked over her shoulder. "Sir, is this the tree you were talking about?"

He crossed over the room, aware that behind him, Daniel was gingerly putting the monkey he carried into Kalen's arms. After a muffled protest the monkey consented to unhook his fingers from Daniel's t-shirt and to fasten them on Kalen's instead, the dark-haired scientist looking like a kid whose Christmases had all come at once. "Of course, we try not to interact with them too much." Kalen held it out so Anwar could touch the monkey's fur. "We don't want them getting tame. But we do like them to be aware of us so we can get close enough to help if one of them is hurt."

"They have the softest fur, don't they?" Anwar stroked the monkey's head with one tentative finger, looking like a kid with a new kitten and not at all like a scientist.

"Sir?"

O'Neill stared at the picture on the wall Carter was pointing at. He recognized it at once. It was exactly like the one on the island, even down to the snake wrapped around it. Above something incomprehensible in what looked more like Greek than Latin was the text: 'The so-called 'Eden Tree', also discovered by Patterson in his historic Eighth Voyage, and so named by him because of the 'Eden Snake' which made these trees their home. Once the medicinal properties of the bark were uncovered by the famous Malike Onanwye the felling and harvesting of the trees began in earnest as pharmaceutical companies hurried to stake their claims to the trees. The venomous Eden Snakes were slaughtered in their thousands…'

O'Neill spun around. "Are Eden Snakes really big with this sort of diamond pattern on their skin and orange eyes?"

Anwar and Kalen both jerked their heads up and gazed at him open-mouthed. They were a good-looking pair and he wondered idly if they were involved with the women whose voices he'd heard over the radio. Then it occurred to him that they could be doin' it with each other and looked at them with more curiosity. Perhaps he was just assuming everyone was gay now that he seemed to be, and how would you tell anyway? Of course it might not have occurred to them to get involved with anyone as they both seemed a little intense about their work, but maybe even naturalists occasionally noticed they were also human beings. He hadn't seen the two women but he liked to think they were also wearing only t-shirts and shorts, and if they were a couple that wasn't exactly an unpleasant thought, especially if one or both of them looked like Lara Croft. Actually, he really liked that idea. A lot. Then he looked across at the other O'Neill, who was gazing at the two scientists with the same thoughtful expression on his face, and realized he was now being as unevolved as that guy was. He was damned sure he wouldn't have been having lesbian fantasies about two women he'd never even seen if that other O'Neill hadn't been around to lower the tone.

"Are you saying…?" Kalen moistened his lips. "You saw one? A live one?"

"Yes. It was on one of these trees. I used the bark to save Daniel." He nodded his head at the man and Daniel gave him a very sweet smile in return.

"It didn't bite you?" Anwar began and then shook his head. "What am I saying? Of course, it didn't bite you. If it had you'd be very, very dead by now. I think seventy paces is the farthest anyone ever got after a bite from one of those snakes. They're not just deadly – in that the toxicity of their venom is off the scale – they're also very dangerous – they bite first and ask questions later."

O'Neill scratched his jaw. "So, it's a poisonous snake then?"

Kalen half-laughed. "It _was_ the most poisonous snake on the planet. Now, it's extinct. As far as we know. But, although it's officially listed as on the extinct list, we're hoping there may be one around here somewhere. This island is the only one that escaped the sea journeys. It's so far from the rest of the chain and the seas are so treacherous that it didn't appear on any charts and so no one knew it existed until after the days of air travel. We still have giant turtles. Nowhere else does. And we still have Patterson Monkeys and all the most endangered flightless birds, like the Inu and the Yenatir. The Inu are extinct everywhere except here and Okoluna. There are Nanteni lizards here and a pretty flourishing population of Matalik frogs and Jewel Snakes as well. Given that those things survived here and nowhere else, we all cherish this hope there may be an Eden Snake as well. This place is so huge there could be a lot living here we don't know about."

"There's one on the ship." O'Neill pointed upwards. "In a bag. With some lizards. Or at least it's a big snake with orange eyes that I found on one of those Eden trees anyway. Maybe it's not the one you're hoping for."

"Can we come and get it?" Kalen demanded. "Now?"

 

They kind of reminded him of Daniel. That Jacob’s voice tended to fall into a different register when his eyes glowed briefly, or that Teal’c had a strange tattoo and was introduced as a Jaffa barely merited a glance. The fact they had just been ringed up into an alien spaceship wasn't of any interest either. Only the animals were interesting and they were the most fascinating thing in the whole world. They netted the butterflies first, explaining that they were Irides Emperors, common on the Island now, but rare elsewhere, and picked up any loose lizards they could find, cooing over them happily. They looked a little askance at the tameness of the monkeys. "Were you feeding them?" Kalen enquired.

As all eyes turned accusingly to Daniel, he shuffled his feet. "I thought it would be useful for evacuating them." A slight raise of his chin, that stubborn look on his face. "Which it was."

Anwar nodded sympathetically. "Much better for them to have their natural behavior patterns compromised than be burnt alive, certainly."

Daniel nodded. "I thought so."

Moving the monkeys was easy. They climbed on the two Daniels and the two O'Neills without a problem, clung happily to Carter who had _definitely_ been feeding them going by the way they immediately started shaking her down for PowerBars – yanking at her t-shirt to check down her bra as if she was in the habit of secreting food there in a way that made O'Neill wonder if they knew something about her he didn't. And to everyone's surprise the shy female with the baby approached Anwar of her own choosing and let him pick her up. He doubted any grandchild had ever been admired more dotingly than that tiny fluffy infant by the two scientists. Down on the planet they were shown an eight-sided fenced compound with trees and a small pool in it where Kalen suggested the monkeys be left to acclimatize for a few days. They had built it when some intrepid explorer had found the last three Patterson Monkeys on Okoluna, he explained, and brought them over at once to join the troupe here. Apparently, they had integrated no trouble at all, Patterson Monkeys being very social and non-aggressive creatures. He was hoping the other troupe would soon be back from the south side of the island and could get used to the idea of there being other monkeys around. The monkeys seemed perfectly happy in their compound, climbing trees and snatching fruit from one another with their old vigor in a matter of moments. O'Neill supposed they were such a strong family unit that wherever they were mattered less than who they were with, a bit like him and Daniel. Given their curiosity he thought they would probably enjoy having a whole new island to explore a hundred times the size of the one they had been on before, and would like meeting new monkeys. Anwar pointed a camera at them as he babbled happily into the communications panel, eliciting excited squeals from the other two scientists who said why did the good things always happen when they were on the other end of the island? The butterflies were easily released to flutter away in a shimmer of blue while the lizards were put into tanks overnight with water and some insect covered leaves to acclimatize. 

Moving the snake was a different matter. After Kalen had explained in a hushed voice exactly _how_ poisonous it was, how there had never been an anti-toxin found for its venom, and how agonizing the paralysis and death was that followed its bite, they had not needed to be told to keep their distance from that innocuous looking bag on the deck.

"You brought the most poisonous snake in the universe onto my ship?" Jacob demanded.

O'Neill winced. "I owed it one."

Daniel raised his eyebrows. "And you talk about me being reckless."

As they watched, a small green lizard scuttled cautiously out of the bag. Anwar gave a little exclamation beside him. "It's a Nanteni Lizard, Kalen."

Kalen shook his head. "Someone please pinch me, because I couldn't bear to wake up and find this was just a dream."

"Well, if it is I'm dreaming it too." Anwar sighed happily as the lizard scuttled over to him. He picked it up carefully and placed it in one of the containers they had carried onto the ship.

Telling Anwar to keep back in a tone that O'Neill recognized all too well as that of someone used to dealing with a too-curious companion, Kalen caught the edge of the bag and dragged it very gently to where the ring mechanism was. Looking up at Jacob he said, "Could you ring it down to here?" Showing the man a plan of the laboratory he marked a neat 'X' on it. "That's our reptile house. From there we should be able to move the snake to a safe place while we assess its condition." 

He thought Teal'c and Jacob looked a little wistful as they were left behind on the ship again without getting to see the interesting stuff but he didn't blame Carter for not volunteering to stay behind herself. He was pretending indifference but he really did want to know if this was an Eden Snake. If he had saved something that wasn't just endangered but believed to be extinct.

Kalen was trying hard not to get too excited, explaining that Eden Snakes had always been described as very aggressive so it made no sense that one would just sit there and let a human pick it up and put it into a sack the way O'Neill had described. Moving swiftly and decisively, he lifted the bag into a divided glass enclosure, explaining that he was hoping to lure the lizards into the other side where they could be safely removed. The lizards proved surprisingly co-operative, clambering out of the bag and finding nothing of interest in that side of the tank, moving towards the water feature and greenery in the other.

"Another Nanteni lizard." Anwar was breathing down O'Neill's neck as he peered into the tank excitedly but O'Neill didn't feel the need to object as the kid was so full of enthusiasm. But the way Kalen gave Anwar an almost imperceptible shove along the tank away from O'Neill did suggest that perhaps the dark-haired scientist had noticed his companion was a nice-looking boy he didn't want to share after all.

"And a Striped Vantel. Two Striped Vantels. A Jewel Frog." Kalen gave O'Neill a look of admiration. "You seemed to have grabbed everything endangered you could find, Colonel. A trained naturalist couldn't have got a better collection."

O'Neill didn't even try not to look smug. He had to admit he wasn't exactly averse to getting all this praise and admiring looks from two good looking boys not wearing very much but when he saw Daniel smiling at him, so happy that he was being praised, he found his chest got a little tighter as his heart expanded a fraction. It was wonderful to be able to give someone else what they most wanted in the world – which in the case of these two, who clearly didn't get out much, seemed to be a lot of snakes, lizards, and monkeys – because he had certainly been given everything he wanted the day that bark had saved Daniel's life, and given it again on the day Daniel had admitted he loved him.

Only after the last legged reptile had clambered out of the bag, did the snake slowly and very cautiously consent to put its head outside. Its orange eyes met O'Neill's and he had no idea what the serpent was thinking, whether it recognized him, blamed him for moving it from its nice familiar tree or was grateful to have been saved from fiery death. The gasp from Kalen and Anwar told him the truth before he turned to look at them.

Anwar had tears in his eyes and Kalen was just staring and whispering, "Oh my God…" over and over.

"So?" The other O'Neill demanded. "Is it one of those extinct snakes or not?"

"Yes," Anwar gasped. He fumbled to shut down the glass partition that would keep the snake in its side of the tank while Kalen switched on some ultra violet light over the tank. At once a screen lit up at the side of the tank and O'Neill realized it must be some kind of X-ray machine, the warm coils of the snake showing up as glowing color within the bag.

"Kalen!" The stifled yelp from Anwar made O'Neill start. He saw the young man point a visibly shaking hand at the screen, pointing out bright points of redness dotted along the snake's body. "Tell me I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing."

Kalen sank into a chair, open-mouthed as he gazed at the screen. As O'Neill looked to Daniel for information and the man shrugged at him helplessly, Carter frowned at the screen and then smiled. "You did good, Sir."

Anwar looked at O'Neill and said a little shakily. "Would you like to name the snake? I think you've really earned that honor."

O'Neill felt a little awkward in front of so many people. If it had just been Daniel it wouldn't have been so bad but with the others around it was a trifle embarrassing. All the same, he'd had a name for it for a while and he wanted to share it, even if the reason was a trifle sappy. "Lucifer. I called him Lucifer. Not just because he was wrapped around the tree, but because he was a…" He looked at Daniel. "A bringer of light. And that's what he brought me. He brought Daniel back to me." He dropped his gaze in embarrassment and then darted a glance across at Daniel to see the man with that look on his face that told him beyond the shadow of any doubt that he was loved.

"That's a lovely story." Anwar gulped. "But maybe not the best name in the world – given the circumstances."

"The snake is female, sir." Carter smiled.

He looked at her in confusion. "As well as knowing chemistry, biology, astrophysics, and how to repair motorbikes you also know how to sex snakes now?"

"No, sir." Her smile grew wider. "But I can read an X-ray." She pointed at the screen. "Your snake is full of fertilized eggs. See those little red glowing points along her body? That's the baby snakes inside the eggs. When you picked her up you took a whole species from extinction to only…heavily endangered."

"We're going to have to keep her here. Make sure the eggs hatch okay." Anwar still looked like someone in deep shock but the scientist in him was reasserting itself. "We have the python maternity ward set up already. That's nice and dark. I think she'll like it there. Tell Christa – no, don't. We don't want them distracted when they're trying to get back here. Remember the time I crashed the shuttle when you told me you'd found an Inu nest…?"

O'Neill smiled as the two of them burbled at one another rapturously. And, okay, he had to admit that Daniel had been right to make them go back to the island. It was nice to have put that expression on someone's face. It felt good to have achieved something that wasn't just taking big guns back to Earth, or, more realistically, given their allies, failing to take big guns back to Earth and instead having a big fight with Daniel about the ethics of it. A thought occurred to him. "That drug you talked about. What was that again?"

The two scientists were oblivious of him, too busy preparing a maternity ward for their not-extinct snake. O'Neill met her orange eyes and it seemed to him she didn't look too unhappy. He was sorry for her lost mate who had presumably died on the island but the look in her eyes suggested she thought he'd done good as well to save her. Carter appeared at his shoulder. "Perhaps she didn't bite you because she was pregnant and it affected her normal behavior?"

"I think she knew I was trying to help." He looked into her orange eyes and wondered if she had. That still didn't explain the first time this supposedly very aggressive snake had just let him take that bark from underneath her coils, but perhaps so long without human interference had blunted the edge of her aggression. He was never going to know because this was one translation job between species that not even Daniel could manage.

"Perhaps she didn't think he'd taste any good," the other O'Neill shrugged.

O'Neill gave him a withering look but was saved having to answer by Jackson who said, deadpan, "I doubt that, Jack. Not if he tastes anything like you." The colonel looked at him for a moment and the fair-haired archaeologist gave him what O'Neill mentally designated a 'come hither' smile. "You taste pretty damned good to me."

As the other O'Neill went to kiss Jackson, O'Neill put a hand on his shoulder. "Do you mind? Not in front of the snake." He jerked a head at Carter and the other O'Neill shrugged.

"Our Carter knows we're an item."

"Bully for you. Your Carter lives in a universe where it's not against the regs. Ours doesn't."

She cleared her throat. "The Natana flowers, sir? You were asking about those? They look like this." She found him the relevant page in his pamphlet even though he had no idea when she'd found the time to read it, and held it out. 

He recognized them at once, sticky-pollened white blooms that didn't heal cuts worth a damn. There had been hundreds of them on the fringes between the shore and the jungle. He and Daniel exchanged a glance. Carter was reading from the pamphlet. "Apparently the pollen gives anyone who swallows it a wonderful high. It's described as far superior to any processed drugs created by mankind."

Daniel spoke for both of them with that muttered, "Damn."

The other O'Neill looked between them in disbelief. "You didn't try it?"

O'Neill shrugged. "I was looking for medicine not happy powder."

Jackson was also reading over Carter's shoulder. "It says that some of their most famous poets have been inspired by the Natana dust to write their greatest works. That it brings a 'clarity and beauty to the mind of such intense pleasure that is comparable to a six hour orgasm'." 

O'Neill and Daniel exchanged another glance, O'Neill reading his own disappointment in Daniel's eyes. The damned flowers had been everywhere. How had they _not_ accidentally imbibed a little of that apparently wonderful dust? He tried to shrug casually. "We made our own entertainment."

"Absolutely." Daniel also shrugged. "We didn't need empty stimulants." He darted O'Neill a look. "You did bring some of that healing bark stuff though, right?"

"Some." O'Neill thought of the hasty handful he'd snatched and thought about explaining to Janet Fraiser he would have grabbed more but he'd been overcome with an irrational urge to save a deadly poisonous snake instead. "Enough for…analysis. Things were a little…eruptive at the time."

"And I'm sure Janet will be very understanding about that." Daniel didn't even try to sound convincing. He smiled at Kalen and said tentatively, "We may need to come back at a later date. Would that be…?"

"Oh, fine." Kalen only had eyes for the snake in her tank. "We'd always be happy to give someone the guided tour. Just as long as you don't take any flora or fauna off the Island, of course." He laughed as if the idea was too absurd to be anything more than a joke and O'Neill groaned inwardly.

"All the trees are protected as well, are they?"

"Absolutely."

O'Neill grimaced. "I guessed they probably would be." He rolled his eyes at Daniel who shrugged in resignation. Janet was going to kill them. Not only was the infirmary going to run red with their blood, but she was probably going to stick really big needles in their asses as well.

Jackson was still reading. "Apparently someone called Anaz el Landa wrote what is described as 'that most dizzyingly beautiful of verse, 'Amounsanet' ' while under its influence." He looked up at his O'Neill. "Do you think that's the equivalent of 'Kubla Khan' for this planet? I wonder if it works for translations? If it actually helps you to realize things you've never realized before…?"

"Drugs are bad." O'Neill snatched the pamphlet out of his hand. "Ask your boyfriend if you don't believe me, I'm sure he can tell you all the reasons why not taking them is a very good idea."

"Oh absolutely." Colonel O'Neill didn't sound any too convincing but he was at least attempting to back him up. "Very bad."

"What about that 'squirrel jump' you bought?"

"Well, I regretted it afterwards."

"And those tablets. What were they called? The ones that you said meant you could keep it up for a – " 

He clamped a hand across Jackson's mouth. "You don't need drugs – you've got me. Now, let's stop talking about anything I may have told you I've done in the past while under the influence of alcohol, and go home. I'm tired of wearing Tollan jewelry and I want to see my own universe again."

Although the man had smiled, O'Neill saw a glimpse of weariness in his doppelganger's eyes and realized it was true, the man really did want to go home. He certainly knew how that felt. The scientists were happy, the snake, monkeys, lizards, frogs, and butterflies were all in a place where they could live out their lives in relative peace and tranquility. There was a still long journey until they could reach the SGC again and he really needed a shower. He looked around at his mismatched crew, Jackson still earnestly reading the pamphlet he had taken back from his weary-looking colonel, a Carter who looked so much better than when they had first ringed aboard the ship, starting to smile again, starting to relax, and Daniel, his Daniel, scruffy, unshaven, unwashed, and wearing borrowed clothes, and truly a sight for very sore eyes. He squeezed Carter and Daniel on the shoulder and found a smile for them so wide it made the salt burn on his lips start bleeding. "Kids, let's go home."

***

Hammond could feel his face actually hurting, he had been smiling so widely and for so long, but he couldn't seem to stop himself. He was feeling the kind of soul-deep happiness and relief that just needed an outlet and there were only so many times he could pat O'Neill or Daniel on the shoulder and tell them how glad he was that they were home. He hardly recognized Major Carter and Teal'c. They were transformed into laughing relaxed human beings after so long as silent stressed-out ghosts. Admittedly, it had not escaped his attention the way they hovered so close to O'Neill and Daniel, Major Carter, in particular, practically clutching Daniel's sleeve, but he was feeling a little like that himself. They all looked tired but so happy. He kept saying 'Good job, people' but however many times he said it, it still didn't feel like enough. He was sorry Narim wasn't there to share the moment of triumph as he had certainly done his part to help, but however complicated a mission it had been, however much of a risk had been taken in using the Tollan, the Tok'ra, the quantum mirror, and the assistance of travelers from a different dimension, it had worked. He had got his people back.

O'Neill and Daniel were a little dazed, certainly, he could see the culture shock hitting them as they found themselves back in a place that was so familiar and yet, after so long away from it, so strange, looking around the SGC as if they were not quite certain it was real. Although they both looked thinner than when he had last seen them and Daniel Jackson's hair was several shades lighter as well as being noticeably longer than when he had seen him last, he was still recognizably their own Daniel Jackson back again. And definitely not the inexplicably barefoot Jackson who had greeted him with that sweet smile and curious self-possession before looking around for coffee. Somehow both Daniels had been supplied with steaming mugs while they were still standing in the 'gateroom, both of them sipping orgasmically and smiling at one another through the steam, one addict empathizing with another.

O'Neill looked lean and suntanned and tired, but also well in a way that Hammond hadn't seen in far too long. Whatever shadow it was that had been haunting him before was gone from behind his eyes. He looked at peace with himself in a way he hadn't been for years. Looking at Daniel Jackson, who also had that look of tranquility he certainly hadn't had when he had left, Hammond suspected it was not yoga or meditation that had led them to this new plateau of peace within themselves. In some ways it was no more than he had expected and he was torn between relief that they had finally worked out what their problem was and solved it, and an inner groan at what a problem this now presented him with. Still, if what he suspected was true, he already had his answer ready, had already thought it through. 

He had decided to combine a celebration supper with the debriefing, so they were dining around the briefing room table, while everyone talked over the top of one another and in the case of the two O'Neills scored points at every opportunity. O'Neill and Daniel had showered and shaved and changed their clothes, but their hair was still ragged and in need of cutting and there was still something more of the beachcomber in O'Neill's appearance than the military officer. O'Neill had said he would eat canteen food if he had to but he'd rather not travel across the universe just to die of salmonella from the commissary's version of chicken fritters so Hammond had ordered food to be sent in from a nearby restaurant. Perhaps it was an extravagance, but it wasn't every day he got two of his best men back from the dead. It was called a 'debriefing' but in reality it was more of a celebration, complete with wine, whiskey, and, of course, coffee. Some information about what had happened since O'Neill and Daniel Jackson had been thrown through the wrong wormhole to their volcanic paradise island was certainly being exchanged but if he was honest, the only information Hammond really needed was here in front of him: his people were back, alive and well, and, according to Doctor Fraiser, apart from a little scar tissue, unscathed.

Interestingly, much of the debriefing was done for him by the Daniel Jackson from the other dimension who had apparently, on the journey home, come to the conclusion that their own SGC needed to mount a mission to their equivalent of the volcanic island chain in which O'Neill and Daniel had been marooned and see if they could save the apparently endangered species that had been living there. Everyone else had looked happy but exhausted, he had just seemed full of enthusiasm, asking Major Carter and Jacob to write down exactly what the coordinates were so the world could easily be found and copying information from a tattered-looking leaflet into his notebook.

The other O'Neill had looked shattered past the point of being able to make more than the weakest protests. Hammond had been sharing twenty year old single malt with everyone – except Daniel Jackson who had insisted he would only drink whiskey if it was added to the strongest cup of coffee available to man – but the visiting O'Neill had been the one to clutch the glass as if it was the most necessary to him as he gazed at the fair-haired Jackson. "You want to go to where there's an erupting volcano to look for a deadly poisonous snake?"

The visiting Jackson was undoubtedly a sweet-natured young man and Hammond could see why his alter ego was so fond of him, but he was also relieved that the Daniel in his dimension had grown up a little past this point. Blinking at his O'Neill in confusion, Jackson said, "Yes. Of course. We could save it from extinction. Oh…and there's that bark stuff in the Eden Tree. We can get General Hammond to authorize a mission to look for that. I'm sure Janet would like some of that in her infirmary. Then while Sam gets the bark stuff we could get the snakes and the monkeys – and what were those lizards called…?"

The visiting O'Neill offered a faint moan and put his head in his hands. Hammond gave him another refill.

There was a regrettable smugness about their own O'Neill as he tugged at his silvered hair and said, "Six months, tops. You'll see. You may as well buy the dye right now."

"The Natana flowers might be worth harvesting too." Jackson seemed oblivious of his partner's unhappiness, frowning thoughtfully from behind the gold circles of his spectacles as he made more notes. "If someone took some of that while wearing one of those Tok'ra things we could see what a really good drug trip looks from the inside. I'm sure Sam would like to know that."

"I _know_ what a really good drug trip looks like from the inside," the other O'Neill protested. "Just drink a lot, stick your fingers in your eyeballs, then watch the Tellytubbies, you'll get the same effect. I really don't think going to that island is a good idea."

"Jack…" Jackson gave him a look of reproach. "Don't you want to save those species from extinction?"

"I have a hard enough time saving you from extinction! Have you forgotten that you went paddling in molten lava to save a damned monkey? I nearly had a coronary!"

"You're not still going on about that, are you?" Jackson looked genuinely surprised.

The visiting O'Neill held out his glass to Hammond in mute appeal and the man refilled it at once. "At least you never need to worry about being bored, Colonel."

The man groaned and rested his head on the desk. "Why couldn't I fall in love with someone with at least a basic sense of self-preservation? Why did it have to be Lemming Boy Jackson?"

Jackson only smiled at that. "You wouldn't want me any other way, Jack. Now, how far was the island Doctor Jackson calls 'Tanui-ike' from the place Anwar and Kalen called 'The Island', General Carter?" Hammond had to smile himself then. The same boy who had been so full of doubts before they had set off had clearly had all of them laid to rest on this trip. It was now evidently as obvious to him as it was to everyone else in the vicinity who didn't need a seeing eye dog that Colonel O'Neill was head over heels in love with him and didn't seem likely to be getting over his infatuation this side of the grave. How swiftly that infatuation was pushing him and his shattered nerves toward the grave was another matter entirely.

Jacob gave the visiting O'Neill a sympathetic look before obligingly sketching out the placement of the island on a piece of graph paper for the curious Jackson.

"I'd like you alive," the visiting O'Neill muttered. "And in one piece would be good. One undamaged piece would be even better."

Delighted as he was to have him back, Hammond couldn't deny that his own O'Neill did seem to be taking a malevolent satisfaction in upsetting his doppelganger. "Talking of undamaged pieces, I'd ask Daniel to show you his last batch of scar tissue, but that would probably just really upset you, wouldn't it? I can't get him to show you his old scar tissue, of course, because the sarcophagus got rid of that when he was being revived – from dying, you know, as he does. Is it three times or four now, Daniel? I forget. You do know yours has an appendix that could blow at any moment, don't you? Just saying. Just a friendly reminder from one team leader to another."

"You _will_ burn in hell," the other O'Neill told him blearily.

"Jack…" Daniel gave the O'Neill from his own dimension a warning look. "Stop being such a…bitch."

"Hey, I was just trying to be helpful." O'Neill took another swig of whiskey, grinning as he did so.

"They were like this all the way home," Jacob Carter shook his head and Hammond sympathetically refilled his glass too. "I never realized quite how many bad things had happened to Daniel until Jack decided to recount every single one of them to Colonel O'Neill in that helpful way of his." 

"That's me." O'Neill smiled. "Mister Helpful."

"I'm glad you told me that," Daniel observed witheringly. "Or I might have mistaken you for Mister Smug Gloating Bastard."

"A lot of people make that mistake." O'Neill looked completely unabashed as he turned to the other O'Neill with a happy smile. "Did I ever tell you about the time Daniel slipped out of phase and ended up invisible and haunting us like a really pissy poltergeist?"

"You need therapy," the visiting O'Neill told him. "You need serious psychotherapy, preferably the kind where they stick electrodes in your brain then hit a really big switch."

Hammond looked at Teal'c and Major Carter. "That must have been a long trip."

"It did indeed appear to be of a considerable duration," Teal'c assured him. His gaze softened as it passed across Daniel then O'Neill. "There were, however, some compensations."

"There certainly were." Sam put her arms around Daniel and hugged him against her body before planting a kiss in his hair.

Daniel rested his head on her shoulder briefly in gratitude then looked across at Teal'c and Jacob. "Thanks for finding us."

Major Carter had to wipe her eyes before she could answer. "Well, we estimated what supplies you had with you, and we realized you'd be getting low on coffee, so we knew the situation was pretty critical."

Daniel looked down at the mug in his hand and sighed happily. "You thought right."

"Does this mean you're _not_ going to be obnoxious in the mornings from now on?" O'Neill pointed to his mug.

Daniel took another swig while giving O'Neill one of his patented 'if your brain was any smaller it would be invisible to the naked eye' withering looks. "No. I'm going to be my usual happy smiling self in the mornings, as I always am, whatever my caffeine intake might be. Are you suggesting otherwise?"

O'Neill looked at his Daniel then at Jackson who was also listening closely to this exchange and cleared his throat. "Um…no. Because I would never do that."

"Glad to hear it."

"Mostly because I like my ribs just where they are and not ripped out and stabbed through my lung."

Daniel wrinkled his nose. "Okay, on the occasion when I threatened to do that, I do admit I may have been a little…testy, but I think we can both agree that you were being more than ordinarily annoying."

"I said the water was going to take five more minutes to boil, Daniel, and unless you wanted lukewarm coffee you were going to have to wait. How is that annoying?" 

"Trust me, it just is."

Hammond noticed the visiting Jackson watching the exchange wide-eyed, and wondered if he was taking notes for future reference. He looked at his own O'Neill and then back at the other one as if he was wondering how anyone could want to threaten someone quite so perfect. He seemed to come to the conclusion that Daniel's O'Neill must just be inferior to his, interlacing his fingers through those of his O'Neill just to let him know he was there. Tired though the older man clearly was, at that affectionate look and touch from the young man beside him he positively melted, reaching out to stroke the young man's bangs back from his eyes. "You okay?" he murmured.

"Yes. You?"

"I'll be glad to be home."

"Me too."

They leaned their heads against one another, fingers still interlaced, nothing other than a unit, unconcealed, unashamed. Hammond looked across the table and saw their Daniel Jackson looking at them wistfully and a sad expression flicker in O'Neill's eyes. They made eye contact then and drew a little away from one another, a conscious averting of his gaze from Daniel while O'Neill brushed imaginary dust from his thigh. Sighing inwardly, Hammond realized that he and O'Neill were going to have that little heart to heart he had been dreading sooner rather than later.

 

"Can we talk, sir?"

Hammond looked up to find O'Neill in his doorway. He looked at the clock on his desk pointedly. "It's a little late, Jack."

O'Neill came into the room and closed the door. "Well, I thought about asking what you were doing up at two in the morning on a schoolnight, General, but I figured it was probably for the same reason I am."

Hammond nodded to the chair, mind working fast as he did so. This was the old and not the old O'Neill who had walked into the room. In some ways he reminded him of the man he had first met, the same combination of bravado, charm, and, just underneath the surface, that serious core. He seemed rejuvenated in some ways, yet there was sadness in his eyes as he looked around the room, as if he thought he might be seeing it for the last time. Hammond reached for the whiskey bottle again. O'Neill appreciated a good single malt like almost no one else on the base except Hammond himself. When O'Neill wasn't around and Jacob Carter didn't visit, the whiskey stayed in the drawer. Hammond had known too many senior officers who had become solitary drinkers, sometimes the pressures of having to send good men into situations where there was a more than even chance they might die created fissures which only alcohol could fill. So, when he was alone, the bottle remained untouched, which made occasions such as these all the sweeter.

He poured them both a tumbler and put the second in front of O'Neill then held up his own. They clinked glasses quietly. "Cheers."

"Cheers." O'Neill took a sip and closed his eyes as he savored it. "I thought about things like whiskey. When I thought the island was going to be our world forever. The things we wouldn't see and touch and taste again. I used to wake up sometimes smelling burgers grilling. You know that burned flavor in the air when you're cooking them in the yard on a summer evening? Nothing like it. I used to wonder how crazy that scent would have to drive me before I'd think killing a monkey was worth it just to taste meat again." He took another swig. "I want to thank you, General."

"You already did," Hammond reminded him gently.

"Some things need saying more than once. We'd be dead now if it wasn't for you. The last thing I ever saw would have been Daniel being eaten by a shark. The last thing I ever heard…" He ran a hand across his face.

"A lot of people got you back. I was just one of them."

"But without you the other people couldn't have done anything. I know how many resources you must have committed to finding us. I needed to tell you that I appreciate that. I know what we cost the SGC in man hours and money, and that makes it all the harder to…"

So, this was where things were. Hammond cleared his throat and held up a hand. "Jack, can I say something?"

"General, while we were on that island, Daniel and I – "

"Colonel O'Neill, I really do need to talk now." 

O'Neill subsided, resigned and weary but obedient. "Yes, sir."

Hammond gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. "Where are our guests?"

"I think Jacob went home with Carter, and Teal'c went with them. They're going to talk…Tok'ra stuff. Colonel…O'Neill and Doctor Jackson are in one of the VIP rooms. I imagine Jackson is thinking up new and exciting ways to get himself killed and the colonel is working on his ulcer. I told Daniel to go to bed about an hour ago on pain of death, so I think that makes it a good bet he's in his office right now reading mission reports and giving himself a caffeine overdose. I'm here because of him, sir. It wouldn't occur to Daniel you'd still be awake at this time of the morning. I imagine he's planning to see you first thing tomorrow." 

Hammond turned around his diary so O'Neill could see it. "He asked for a ten-thirty appointment." He didn't mention that Doctor Jackson had tried to see him that night but Hammond had told him he was too tired to talk and it would have to wait until morning.

"He thinks he'd be happy just looking at artifacts other people have brought home. Working on translations other people have filmed. But he wouldn't. I know he wouldn't. He's not the one who needs to resign."

Hammond cleared his throat. "Before you hand me your resignation, suggest Major Carter as the new CO of SG-1, and tell me a lot of things we both know aren't true about how much you enjoy fishing, Jack, perhaps you could listen to what I have to say?" He took a deep breath, picking his words carefully. "SG-1 has never been like any other team in the SGC. For one thing, there is no other team in the SGC I met in 1969. No other team comprised of people I had met before I ever met them. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps for others, that has always given SG-1 a special place in my heart. If there is a way this team can stay intact I want to find it."

"Sir, Daniel and I broke the – "

"Do you remember what I told you when you requested permission to go and retrieve Doctor Jackson from the other dimension?" He was careful not to say 'from that other Jack O'Neill's bed' but they both knew where Daniel Jackson had been found on that occasion. No one had needed to tell Hammond directly what had happened, a good CO found out about these things by osmosis, and although he said it himself, Hammond did think he was a good CO.

"That anything done in a different dimension has no bearing on what happens in this one?" O'Neill put down his whiskey glass. "Except, we didn't leave this dimension."

"But everything was altered for you on that island, all the same. You may as well have been in a different universe because as far as you knew there was no way you would ever be coming home. It was no different than when you believed yourself stranded forever on P5C 768. Had you married Laira after that and brought her back with you to Earth, no one would have asked for your resignation."

"Laira wasn't a member of my team, sir." _She was just a very kind, very lonely woman who thought she saw something in me that meant we could have been happy together, as long as I was an exile, as long as I was part of her world._ She had been wiser than him. He'd thought what they had was special enough to survive uprooting, still reeling from the culture shock of rescue and trying to hold onto both worlds simultaneously, even as she had already worked out that this was 'goodbye' forever.

"But Doctor Jackson is a civilian." Hammond saw he had all of O'Neill's attention, but was careful not to make eye contact, pretending a deep interest in the citations on his wall. "When SG-1 goes on a mission, I expect you to carry out that mission, safeguard this facility and through it this world from any harm to which it may become exposed as a consequence of your going on that mission, and to protect your team. I also expect you to protect any civilian members of your team a little more closely than you would someone who has chosen a career in the military, or –" he risked a glance at O'Neill to see if he was taking this in, "someone who has had a century in which to polish his military skills, and has an immune system that can repair almost any injury. Do I make myself clear?"

O'Neill ran a hand through his hair, expression thoughtful. "You're saying you think it's okay for me to play favorites as long as Daniel is the one I'm favoring?" 

"When did you ever not favor Doctor Jackson? When did Major Carter not favor him? When did Teal'c not favor him?"

"Teal'c has that whole…blood-debt-obligation-Sha're thing going on, it's probably a cultural thing with him, and Carter's never had kids and I think that's kind of upped her maternal instinct drive, and Daniel seems to appeal to women in the same way kittens do. One look and they want to protect him or cuddle him or both. But I –" 

Hammond waited politely for O'Neill to wrestle with those inconvenient memories. O'Neill grimaced as he got playback from various events from his past. "Okay, so maybe I –" He held up a finger. "When it mattered, I put the Earth first."

"That was going to be my next question. If the circumstances were the same and the only way to save a mission whose purpose was to save the planet was to sacrifice Doctor Jackson, could you do it?"

O'Neill thought for a moment and then nodded. "Daniel has made it pretty clear to me over the years that he thinks we all have an obligation to lay down our own lives if those of others are threatened, and I agree with him. I mean – that's not saying I don't want to swat him sometimes when he's making me do things I don't want to do. But he made me leave him behind on that ship when I really didn't want to, and I still pressed the button on an explosive device I thought might kill him when it seemed the right thing to do."

Hammond topped up both their whiskey glasses. "Colonel, no doubt you know your own feelings best, but I've been telling the Pentagon for years that the bonds formed between members of an SG team are closer than those of any other military unit I have ever encountered. In the case of SG-1, which has a more…eccentric configuration than that of other SG teams, I think it goes double. My question is, close as you have always been to Doctor Jackson, whatever the fine details of your friendship may now be, can you honestly tell me there has ever been a time on any mission on which he has accompanied you where his safety has not been a constant in the back of your mind, and where his death or capture would not have been something you would go to considerable lengths to avert?" As O'Neill didn't answer he continued quietly: "The regulations exist for a very good reason. They exist to prevent dishonorable conduct. To prevent favoritism. To prevent errors of judgment that could lead to unnecessary losses. Had you formed an attachment to the wife of a fellow officer, I would accept your resignation on the spot. Had you formed an attachment to a fellow officer under your chain of command, I would accept your resignation on the spot."

"Daniel's under my chain of command, sir. I'm responsible for his life out there. And for Carter and Teal'c's life."

"The difference being that if you had formed a romantic attachment to Teal'c which made you more inclined to save his life in battle than that of anyone else, when one of your teammates was a civilian archaeologist, the safety of Doctor Jackson would have been undermined by your new closeness to Teal'c." Hammond took another sip of whiskey and fixed O'Neill firmly with his gaze. "Not that I am suggesting you have formed a romantic attachment to any of your teammates, O'Neill. Given that one of them is a subordinate and two are male civilian consultants, we both know that such an attachment would be against the regulations. What am I saying is that it is an inevitable consequence of you and Doctor Jackson having believed for several weeks that you were going to be spending the rest of your lives together that you should have grown closer, and that there will now be a greater…intensity to your friendship. Would you agree with that?"

O'Neill took a rapid slug of whiskey. "Yes, sir. I'd say Daniel and I are definitely even more…intense than we used to be."

"That's perfectly understandable, Colonel. Given that Doctor Jackson's apartment was re-let while he was absent and his possessions are now currently held in storage, it is also clear to me that he is either going to have to take up temporary residence in the SGC or else one of his teammates is going to have to offer him accommodation. As his CO and his closest friend I was hoping you might be willing to step into the breach and –"

"Yes, sir." O'Neill moistened his lips. "General, you know I have too much respect for you to want to –"

"There are some things even the closest friends can't talk about, Jack. But where there's trust and there's respect, I hope that doesn't have to be a problem. I am telling you here and now that I don't feel it's necessary for you to resign, that it would be counter-productive to the Stargate Program for the SGC to be prematurely robbed of your active participation, that I don't want to have to break up a winning team unless I absolutely have to. When you go through that Stargate I expect you to put your mission and this facility first and your teammates a close second. I also expect you to guard the life of the member of your team who is not a trained military officer or ex-first Prime of Apophis a little more closely than you might your other teammates. I also expect you to be able to sacrifice any member of your team for the greater good if the painful occasion warrants it. If you can't fulfill those expectations then tell me now and I will think about reassigning you or Doctor Jackson."

O'Neill swallowed. "I think I can fulfill those expectations, General. I may not know until I step through the 'gate the first time after…after so long away, but I think I can still…be a good team leader. I need to ask Teal'c and Carter –"

"Major Carter and Teal'c have already been in to tell me that they see no reason why you should not lead SG-1 as before. Teal'c did observe that he would prefer if it you 'washed the sand from behind your ears' first but I think that was a literal rather than metaphorical preference on his part. Both of them have expressed total confidence in your leadership despite your enforced time away from the SGC. Major Carter said she has no doubt you will still remember how to shoot a P-90 when the occasion requires it."

Hammond was touched by how close to tears O'Neill looked and the husky tone to his voice as he lowered his gaze. "They're good people."

"Smart people too, Jack. They both recognize a good leader when they have one. They don't think you're going to let them down. I don't think you're going to let them down. I suggest you have faith in our judgment for now, and when you and Doctor Jackson have had some time to recover from your ordeal, I expect to see you back here, ready, willing, and able to lead your team through the Stargate."

O'Neill was unashamedly swallowing now. "Yes, sir. Thank you." He looked up and made eye contact and Hammond saw how moved he was. "Will you tell Daniel?"

Hammond smiled. "I'll be glad to." He rose to his feet and patted O'Neill gently on the shoulder. "Now go and find a bunk somewhere, Jack. I'm giving you two weeks to recuperate, and given that Doctor Jackson has a lot of possessions he's no doubt going to want your help unpacking and several artifacts of possibly vital significance he'll want to examine, I think you're probably going to be glad of this one night in the SGC to catch up on your sleep."

Only after Hammond had ushered the man out of the door, did he sit down, take a deep breath, and then drain his glass of whiskey. The malt tasted smooth on the tongue and then burned a comforting path all the way down to his gut, snatching a little air from his lungs en route. He hadn't actually broken any rules, but he had just bent some to the point where they could be used for a boomerang. Was he snatching at the comfort of the familiar? Ignoring the writing on the wall, this the very first step in an error of judgment that may lead to the inevitable death of good people whom he would later look back to this moment and know he could have saved? Was he endangering Teal'c and Major Carter simply because, after having lost half of his flagship team for so long, he didn't want anything to prevent SG-1 going back through the 'gate again, just as they'd used to, whole and perfect? Or was it a sound instinct, that instinct he had relied upon so many times in the past, telling him that O'Neill was as good a man and as good a team leader as he had always been, and that whatever he and Doctor Jackson might think had altered in their relationship, all they seemed to have truly done was make something concrete that had previously been nebulous. 

Every time harm had come to Daniel Jackson in the past, O'Neill had taken it about as badly as it was possible for a man to take any setback or sorrow. He still had vivid memories of the savage rawness of O'Neill's grief as he smashed Hammond's car window after thinking the archaeologist had been burned alive in front of him. Even on the first mission out, when Jackson had been in the process of falling in love with the woman who had later become his wife, and when O'Neill had undoubtedly still been hoping to salvage his own marriage, O'Neill had listened to Daniel Jackson instead of his standing orders and then lied in an official report for that young man's sake. Hammond didn't believe they had deepened their relationship while stranded together, it had already been as deep as the Grand Canyon, they had simply resolved it. They had worked out the reason for their latent annoyance and frustration with one another and found a solution. If anything, he thought the team would run more smoothly now than it had before. Having two members of a four person team smoldering at one another with unresolved romantic tension and all the accompanying negative emotions that engendered had not made for a cohesive unit. The way he saw it, O'Neill and Doctor Jackson had resolved an unsatisfactory situation. He was not intending to examine too deeply the way in which they had resolved it, he was just going to assume that the better understanding they had reached would be a good thing in the long run. 

It had always been a long shot to have Doctor Jackson on the team. As with Teal'c, there had seemed more reasons not to have him on SG-1 than there were to want them there. But, also as with Teal'c, it had worked. SG-1…worked. The way miracles did. The way he had known it would. A whole greater than the sum of its parts. It was worth taking a chance to keep that team together for as long as possible, especially when it was a chance Teal'c and Major Carter were themselves so eager to take. They wanted O'Neill and Doctor Jackson back, they'd made that clear. Under any circumstances, they would rather be together than apart. It was Teal'c who had said that nothing had truly changed except for O'Neill and Daniel Jackson's perceptions of their friendship, to others they were as they had always been. Others, perhaps, had always seen more clearly than they had themselves the strength of their tie to one another.

Much verbal tap-dancing had been indulged in, dance steps so neat and subtle his late wife would have been amazed. Slower than usual sentences with carefully selected words. Nothing stated or admitted. Little said but everything nevertheless communicated. They knew. Carter and Teal'c knew. They didn't care. It wouldn't matter. It had always been like this. Always, from the beginning. Those two, a couple, a unit, an extra dimension to their relationship that defied description. Sex was meaningless, new icing on a very old cake, the recipe fundamentally unchanged. Essentially, Major Carter's expressive blue eyes seemed to say, all that had truly happened on that island was that Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Daniel Jackson had finally caught up with the rest of the world in realizing what their relationship actually was. To no one else did it come as any great revelation.

Hammond sighed and closed the file he had been keeping on the search and rescue of his missing people. The decision was made and it sat right with him, a warmth like that whiskey. O'Neill knew how much he was being trusted and he would be worthy of that trust, Hammond had no doubt of that, and in the meantime he could finally afford to exhale after what felt like months of holding his breath. His people were home again, and that was what mattered. Mission accomplished with no loss of life. Restoration achieved. Tonight, for the first time in more nights than he wanted to count, he believed he would sleep well. He hoped his dead wife would visit his dreams again, the way she did sometimes, when he was at his most troubled or contented, and that when he woke tomorrow he would still be able to smell the perfume she always used to wear.

***

Another beautiful morning on Tollana. Strange to take this walk in the company of both Jack O'Neills. Stranger still to take this walk in the company of the man who had usurped him in his ex-lover's affections. Daniel darted a glance around at their company. Sam and Teal'c were walking together as if joined by an invisible thread, bound by recent events, he thought, he could see what the loss of himself and Jack had done to them in the way they clung to one another. Jackson was looking up at the sky as he walked, and although he would never have admitted it to Jack, Daniel had to admit the guy did look very…young. Was it the hair? Or the glasses? Or just his general demeanor? O'Neill was hovering near at hand as if he thought the younger man was perennially poised to trip, ready to catch him if he fell. Daniel had to smile at that, it was silly, but more than a little sweet.

It was a shock to notice that Jack was as close to him as O'Neill was to Jackson. Daniel frowned. He was sure Jack didn't hover in case of imminent disaster though. They were long past that point with one another. Maybe they just took comfort from close proximity. He knew he did. It felt right to be by Jack's left shoulder, the sound of their matched footsteps a pleasant music to his ears. 

Narim was there to meet them, offering kind words of welcome and a special smile for Sam, their fingers touched. She was too conflicted, still grieving for Martouf, but so grateful to the handsome Tollan. Daniel wondered if they'd slept together while he and Jack had been gone. He hoped Narim didn't get his heart broken just because he and Jack had left Sam in need of comfort. When she and Narim nodded to one another there was a quality to Sam's smile that made him think something had taken place between them, a softness there, a little wistful, a little guilty, thinking that in another world and another time, they could have been together, but it was just too complicated here. He knew that look too well. He and O'Neill had mirrored it to one another in so many of those shabby motel rooms. 

It was a relief to turn back to O'Neill and Jackson and see two people whose lives were so free of complications. They were going home together and they were happy. O'Neill looked tired, certainly, pretty much exhausted, in fact, and Daniel suspected the entropic cascade devices, however effective they might be, had only been imperfectly successful. Every now and then, he noticed, O'Neill or Jackson would wince a little, and although they didn't blur in and out the way Doctor Carter had done, they did look as if they were at least getting pins and needles. Daniel wondered if he would have been prepared to risk his corporeal integrity to cross dimensions and galaxies to help save the ex-boyfriend of the man he loved. Maybe a few years ago, the mental place this Jackson seemed to be felt more like someone he had used to be, than someone he now was, would he do it now? He looked at Jackson's face, such clear skin and wide eyes, so open to everything, full of trust and blithe confidence in the world around him. Yes, okay, Daniel would probably have gone, but he was damned sure he would have bitched about it a lot more than this guy was doing.

It was strange to see both Jack and Colonel O'Neill in their dress blues, those subtly different ribbons on their chests, both of them looking pressed and ironed and military and handsome. Daniel thought the silver hair really suited Jack better than the brown. Yes, O'Neill looked younger than Jack did, but Daniel thought Jack looked sexier. He doubted Doctor Jackson would agree with him though.

He looked across at the young man again and saw himself as he had used to be. Except the only time he had ever looked like this was on Abydos, in that brief year of happiness he and Sha're had shared under the shifting desert skies. Jack had brought a refugee back from the wreckage Apophis had wrought, bewildered, angry, stubborn, scared. This version of Daniel Jackson, for all the unruly fair hair now getting in one eye, was none of those things. He was happy and secure, as someone is who knows that he is loved.

As Daniel watched, he saw O'Neill reach across and tuck a strand of the younger man's hair behind one ear. "You'll go blind."

A look of mild exasperation from Jackson, who had been trying to read something in Tollan. Had Captain Carter taught him Tollan? Daniel hadn't mastered that language yet. Then a smile, almost a leer, "I thought that was what I had you for – to prevent that."

O'Neill laid a finger across the young man's mouth, a very gentle finger, more of a caress than a reproof. "Hush, this is the PG-13 dimension, remember? No one has sex here or their head explodes."

"Is that right?"

"That's an absolute anthropological fact, Doctor Jackson. And just one of the many reasons why you would find it really boring here and should come straight home with me."

Daniel felt the tiniest pang, just because once upon a time he had been the guy O'Neill was trying to lure back to his own dimension, the guy O'Neill had been flirting with in that sweet not-so secretive way of his. It wasn't that he begrudged Jackson his happiness with this man, at all. He didn't. He was glad for Jackson, and, after being the one seduced onto his knees by this man he did get a kick out of the thought that inter-dimensional karma had now decreed O'Neill should be a hopeless slave to the Daniel Jackson of his own dimension. O'Neill wasn't so much putty in Jackson's hands, as pure marshmallow. A fitting payback indeed for all those people he had seduced over the years with those sexy whispers and skilful fingers and scarily accurate knowledge of where even total stranger's erogenous zones were situated. It was just the openness of it he missed. Of being flirted with by someone who made it clear he wanted to seduce him. Nothing about his and Jack's relationship could be open. Not if they wanted to go on doing the job that they loved. 

Jackson was gazing up at O'Neill and Daniel noted in some surprise how much taller than him the older man was. It was only two inches on their personnel files, which sounded like nothing at all, but despite the length of Jackson's legs, their eyeline was quite different. Jackson had to look up to his dress blues clad lover and was doing so now, hair shaken back from his face, lips slightly moist, a besotted expression on his face he probably thought he was managing to hide. Everything about their relationship was so damned simple, and shiny, and new, and sweet, and impossibly romantic. Their life was just one long round of candlelit suppers, red roses, love poetry, and very wild sex, only sporadically interrupted by the occasional alien abduction. And he was glad for them, glad for the man who had bought him dinner and kissed him and made him feel good about himself, and for that other version of himself who had been an orphan for so many years, and who had trouble believing himself worthy of love. He wasn't someone who had ever had a problem with happy endings, even long after he had stopped believing it was something he was ever going to find.

They walked out of the sunlight and into the cool pastels and trinium gleam of the Tollan interior decoration, bubbles rising in a turquoise liquid set into a pillar which Jack always dismissed as 'alien lava lamp décor' but which Daniel had to admit did soothe him in the way it was no doubt intended. And there was the mirror, portal to pan-dimensional adventure, a subtle energy radiating from it, like the suppressed danger of a thousand perilous worlds.

The mirror was so different from the 'gate. It still exerted the same fascination for him. Daniel looked at it, the beauty of the frame, a stone like glass, or else a glass like stone, he wasn't sure which. But when the 'gate was sending travelers to a different part of the universe it showed them how magnificent it was, that violent splash of blue, powerful enough to disintegrate the unwary, the shimmering seduction of the event horizon. A huge stone ring, in a usually sacred place, the hieroglyphs and inner crystals of the DHD. All pointers to tell anyone that this was an object of great power and significance. The mirror, by comparison, was deceptively plain, and yet it could take the traveler not just to another part of their own galaxy, but to a different dimension altogether, and there was nothing to tell the unwary that, just a low level hum, a faint flicker of static electricity. It sent a tiny lap of light across its surface now, across the mirror that didn't reflect any of them, that was the only clue to how dangerous it was. Sam had told him black holes were like that, nothing you could see before it was too late and you were sucked in and lost forever. He couldn't believe now that he had ever contemplated just touching that mirror and going, thinking any dimension he ended up in would be better than his own.

A hand closed on his arm and he looked up to find Jack standing next to him. "Don't touch it."

"I'm just looking at it."

"Yes, but other people look with their eyes, with you, it always involves…touching."

Daniel gazed at him for a moment. This was the same man who had told him he was deadweight. The same man who had slashed his own skin open with a knife and risked blood poisoning and agonizing death to save him. The same man whose kiss could light a fire… He forced himself to think of other things before moving freely became an impossibility. Not making eye contact he murmured quietly, "I'm not going anywhere."

"Well, not without me, you're not." 

If they had been born into a dimension where it wouldn't have been against the regulations for them to kiss, they would have kissed then. Kissed and kept on kissing. Daniel looked at Jack's mouth and moistened his lips, sighing inwardly, because although this was the dimension he definitely wanted to be in, some aspects of it really sucked.

"Take this with you, Colonel. A gift from the Tollan of this dimension to the Tollan of your dimension…" 

They both turned to find Narim pointing to the narrow bracelet around Colonel O'Neill's arm. Technology the other Tollana hadn't perfected yet. Daniel had taken a brief look at it and seen that the metal was probably trinium based and that the different colored panels on its seemed to have faintly pulsing lights, but there had been no markings or carvings on the bracelet. Like too much of Tollan technology and architecture for his taste, the general impression had been smooth and featureless.

"And you are feeling none of the sensations described by Doctor Samantha Carter when she suffered from entropic cascade failure?"

O'Neill grimaced. "Actually, you kind of feel it all the time. The doohickey stops it going any further than a millisecond but it can't prevent it starting. So you basically feel like you're about to bust out of your skin. Constantly."

Sam looked up. "Like the iris in front of the 'gate – so close to the event horizon that nothing has time to reassimilate, but not stopping the process from beginning, just completing."

O'Neill nodded. "Yeah, pretty much. It's a kind of…weird feeling. Like a permanent grating in your nerves."

"Why didn't you say something?" Daniel demanded.

The man looked at him for a long moment. "It wasn't important."

"You could have stayed in your own dimension," Jack pointed out. Daniel suspected Jack would have preferred that anyway, although he and O'Neill did seem to have come to, if not a true understanding, at least a cessation in hostilities.

"What? And rob Daniel of the chance to get himself killed in new and interesting ways? Why would I want to do that?" O'Neill looked at the younger man beside him affectionately but Jackson was looking at Daniel.

"Jack needed to be here. And I needed to be with him. And as things turned out, you needed me anyway, so it was just as well I came."

"Yes, there are two more Patterson monkeys in the world because of you." Daniel smiled at him, then let his gaze drift back to O'Neill. "And about a hundred more gray hairs on Colonel O'Neill's head."

Jackson looked between Jack and O'Neill. "I think the gray suits them, don't you?"

"Oh, definitely." Daniel's smile widened. "It's distinguished."

"Very – distinguished – good word. Adds that certain man-of-the-world, cosmopolitan, rakish quality, I think. Very attractive. Very sophisticated."

Jack appeared unamused. "We have gray hairs because you scare the shit out of us, and no amount of sweetening it with dinky adjectives makes up for what you've done to us."

Daniel realized it was the first time Jack had referred to himself and O'Neill as 'us', admitted in anything except the most negative way that they had sprung from the same DNA. O'Neill was nodding emphatically. "What he said. Don't think the next time you do something more than usually terrifying that throwing a few 'distinguished's at me is going to make up for it."

Jackson's tongue flickered across his lips. Daniel's lips were always getting dry and it was automatic to moisten them. He'd never thought anything of it until he saw the way Jackson did it, a darting caress of tongue across mouth while his gaze stayed fixed on O'Neill, the look in his eyes making it clear that what had begun as unconscious mouth-moistening was now undoubtedly a deliberate come-on. "I may be able to find other ways to make it up to you, Jack. I have some books about the Spartan culture that suggest certain…methods of reparation that I think you may find acceptable."

Daniel wondered if the way O'Neill looked now was how he'd looked when Sha're had kissed him in front of everyone. All he remembered was all the blood leaving his brain and going straight to his groin as she let him taste the food in her mouth. A guy looked kind of silly when he was standing in front of an audience, unable to disguise his arousal while his groin got harder and harder. Daniel watched in fascination as the tongue flickered across Jackson's mouth again. That guy could play O'Neill like a fish. This was the 'innocent little Daniel Jackson' to whom Kawalsky hadn't wanted to talk about threesomes? Daniel was still in the starting blocks of depravity compared with this guy. He felt another slight pang of loss as he realized Jackson and O'Neill had done things in bed that he probably never would. His Jack hadn't the mileage that Jackson's O'Neill did, didn't know all those tricks. It occurred to him that perhaps sometimes old dogs could learn new tricks, after all, and even if Daniel didn't have the library full of ancient porn Jackson obviously did, there was always the Internet. And perhaps some things were better learned for the first time together anyway.

Taking pity on O'Neill, who looked as if he wanted to bid them farewell, but thanks to Jackson's tongue-tease wasn't really in a fit state to move, Daniel crossed over to where he was standing, so close to that mirror with its faint flicker of blue light.

It was strange to be near to him and not be the focus of his attention. He didn't even want his attention, he loved the Jack he loved far more and was delighted O'Neill and Jackson had finally found one another, but it was strange, all the same. "Thanks for everything, Colonel. Jack and I would be dead if it wasn't for you. He may be hiding it well but he really does appreciate it." He half-smiled. "I appreciate it too."

"Hey, no problem. Just glad we could help. There can never be too many Daniel Jacksons in the universe." O'Neill made as if to hug him and then stopped himself. They winced at one another, both letting the other knew they understood, the bad spouses who had cheated on their partners and been forgiven but weren't allowed to transgress again, or even give the appearance of transgression. They shook hands instead and the man's hand felt just like Jack's, the skin slightly rough from work, but so warm, and strong, those beautiful fingers life had broken and bashed a little out of shape. O'Neill's eyes were as kind as ever, a lot of warmth in their brown depths. "Take care of yourself, Doc. Don't scare the old guy too much. Watching you get hurt is never going to make any Jack O'Neill's top ten fun list."

"Oh, and you take such good care of yourselves, of course." Daniel could feel the tears far closer than he would have thought. He supposed the connection between them would always be there. Because it was so much weaker than the bond he shared with his Jack O'Neill, he'd forgotten how strong it still was. 

"Bye, Doc." They did hug after all, but gingerly, as if they each had brittle bones, keeping their groins away from one another, only their upper bodies briefly touching.

Narim adjusted something and an image flickered into life in the mirror. Daniel saw a familiar figure gazing intently into the glass and managed a smile. Just how often did Kawalsky come to the mirror to look for them? Was there a permanent watch set on the thing over there and this just happened to be his shift or was the major camped there 24/7 with sandwiches and a vacuum flask? Either way he was glad to see the man's face. "Hey, Kawalsky." He waved and the man waved back, holding up two thumbs in relief, grinning and scanning what he could see of the room.

O'Neill also waved and seemed to follow Kawalsky's frantic mouthing of words without difficulty. He nodded. "He's right here. He's fine." He reached out and snagged Jackson by the jacket, towing the younger man out of a conversation with Sam. Jackson went on talking to her as he was tugged, hardly seeming to notice he was now moving of someone else's volition. 

"Our Sam would love to know about… Oh, is it time to go? Hello, Kawalsky. You see, I told you I'd be fine."

"He can't hear you, Danny." O'Neill ruffled his hair affectionately and made lots of hand gestures to Kawalsky while pointing at Jackson that Daniel guessed suggested imminent death narrowly averted on several occasions. Kawalsky made a brow mopping motion in return and shook his head at Jackson.

The young man looked suspiciously at O'Neill. "What did you just tell him?"

"That you're fine, of course. What else would I tell him?"

"I thought we agreed he didn't need to know about the lava?"

O'Neill sighed and shrugged. "You know me when I've had a few drinks, Daniel. It may just slip out."

Jackson put his head on one side. "What do you want to _not_ tell him about the lava?"

O'Neill looked around at the listeners. "Let's negotiate when we're home. After a shower. Or maybe during a shower. During a shower would probably be best."

"Has anyone ever told you that you're a dirty old man?"

"More people than you've had hot dinners." 

Daniel realized this was it, their last chance to converse. They all knew that once O'Neill went through the mirror they would never see him or Jackson again, and yet this was the first man he'd ever had sex with, but he couldn't think of anything to say. Abruptly he said, "What about the disks?"

"Disks?" O'Neill looked confused.

"The ones we found in the other universe. You were going to check them out for information. Did you learn anything from them?"

Jackson looked up. "Oh, we got rid of those. All the information on them had been obtained under torture. It wouldn't have been ethical to use anything we learned from them anyway so we decided it was much better to just incinerate them. Our Tok'ra did it."

It was very difficult not to smile. Jackson was fiddling with his pack as he spoke, not aware of that embarrassed grimace O'Neill was giving. Daniel felt a small glow of triumph because O'Neill had ended up doing what he had said, even if it was a different version of himself that had persuaded him. Their relationship was certainly subtly different from the one he and Jack shared, theirs seemed to be based on O'Neill doing whatever Jackson said and Jackson kissing him absently on the nose from time to time, but it still seemed to work okay. "That's good to know," he observed.

O'Neill shrugged his shoulders in an admittance of defeat. "See you around, Doc. I'll give your love to Kawalsky."

It wasn't easy to find a smile because as goodbyes went this was one was a little tough, on the other hand he had reached the stage where he just wanted it to be over. "You do that."

As O'Neill reached for the mirror, Jack was there. He held out a hand, intense and serious, even a little smile as he met the man's brown eyes. "Thank you. For everything. For helping Daniel the first time you met him. For risking your necks to come and save us. I'm truly grateful." 

Daniel felt so proud of Jack he couldn't stop it showing on his face. He looked at Jackson looking between them with that sweet expression of approval, moved by them, their vulnerability and their strength, the maddeningly loveable package that was Jack O'Neill, and feared his own expression was just as doting.

O'Neill shook Jack's hand briskly and nodded. "Under the circumstances, Colonel, it seemed like the least I could do." He lowered his voice to add: "Look after him."

"You know I will." There was no hint of offence in Jack's voice. He nodded at Jackson. "Take care of yours too. A retractable dog leash might be a start."

"It's actually top of my shopping list."

Jackson heard the last bit and looked between them, blinking in confusion. "What?"

"Nothing." O'Neill patted Jack on the shoulder. "See you around, Colonel."

"I hope not, Colonel."

O'Neill grinned, a flash of white teeth, his old Errol Flynn style shit-eating grin, then nodded to Narim, smiled at Teal'c and Sam, murmured a last goodbye, and then they were leaving. Jackson turned as they touched the mirror and Daniel saw his expression, which was gentle and kind, and perhaps a little pitying. Daniel realized Jackson thought he had got the long straw, and Daniel the short, thought Daniel had settled for second best. He felt the indignation bubble up at the realization, mouth open to refute it, and then realized it was better just to let it go. If the Daniel Jackson in O'Neill's dimension thought his colonel was the brightest and best in the whole pan dimensional soup kitchen, let him. Daniel knew better. He waved again, a farewell smile, brighter and a little breezier than he felt, plastered on his face, and then Narim switched off the mirror and it was over. This time, it was truly over, and it was just him and Jack, at last, with the people with whom they were meant to be. 

Daniel smiled and Jack leaned across and clasped a hand in his hair, their foreheads touching briefly, just like friends greeting one another after a long absence – Daniel thought it was something men who were just friends would do, anyway. He hoped so, because they were doing it, and Sam and Teal'c could see them.

"Are you ready to go home?" Jack asked tenderly. "Because I don't know about you, but I'm beat."

"Home sounds good." Daniel closed his eyes and felt the warmth of Jack's skin against his. "Home sounds wonderful, in fact." He reached out for Sam and Teal'c and she was there in a moment, he breathed in her perfume as he felt her arm go around his back and wrapped his around her waist, feeling how bony she was, wasted with anxiety. He hugged her close, but gingerly, afraid of bruising her. He'd never thought of her as fragile, but they had worn each other too fine. He inhaled, still keeping his eyes closed and there were all the scents he needed around him, candle wax and that faintly scented oil that always made Teal'c's skin such a comfort, Jack's so familiar aftershave, Sam's perfume and the herbal tang of her shampoo. Her skin was so soft against his face after Jack's stubbled jaw. Still with his eyes closed he found Teal'c's back and touched it, hugged Sam a little tighter, felt her grip him in return, felt Teal'c's fingers gently rub his arm, and there they were, all wrapped in an unshakeable embrace, a circle of friends, total greater than the sum of its parts. For this, it was worth crossing any galaxy, enduring any peril, to come back to this, and to Jack later, in the darkness and the eager silence and a very different embrace.

Daniel felt tears on his cheek and opened his mouth to tell Sam it was okay, they were home now, then realized he was the one crying and Sam the one whispering to him so gently that it really was over, they really were back, SG-1 was back, and everything was just the way it was always meant to be.

***

He still listened for the sound of the sea. O'Neill sighed as the lost echoes whispered in his mind. Echoes of the waves against the beach, echoes of the gulls, the sound the palm trees made at night. They would fade, were already fading, but he didn't want to let them go just yet. Their leaving of the island had been so violent, so fraught with danger, he hadn't fully had a chance to mourn it. So, that was why, a week after he had waved goodbye to his doppelganger through the Tollan 'gate, in the shadowy gloom of his bedroom, he was still letting go of their cabin, and the gullsong, and the perpetual music of the sea upon the sand.

One sound he had carried with him and could hear still was Daniel's breathing, the same steady rhythm he had listened for in the darkness of their shelter when the world rippled beneath them like a lioness awakening from sleep. O'Neill turned to look at him and eyelids flickered, long eyelashes lifted, and blue eyes gazed at him in a way that made his knees stop aching, and his back stop twanging in an instant.

"Can't you sleep?" Daniel licked his lips, the way he always did on waking, hair a little mussed, smelling warm and sweet. 

"It's the waking up and not knowing where I am." He softened it with a smile, but he did dream of volcanoes erupting, of bullets hitting Daniel, of bushes burning and the scream of a world dying in a flurry of ash and flame. 

Daniel inched closer to him so their sides were touching and put an arm across his chest, resting his chin on O'Neill's shoulder. "You're where I am."

O'Neill bent and nuzzled his head, inhaling the scent of him. "I know."

They both knew this was temporary. The USAF had refused to authorize paying for Daniel's apartment in his absence, not when he was listed as 'missing, believed killed'. What else could they do when the last report they had of him was as someone riddled with alien gunfire? So, Daniel had come back to no home, and all his possessions, even the grand piano, neatly packed into wooden boxes and held in a warehouse. As he had pointed out, somewhat bitterly, to anyone who would listen, it would have probably cost less to keep up the payments on his apartment than pack up everything he owned and carry it off to a USAF facility. Daniel had grabbed back the books straight away, of course. The office artifacts. The personal possessions without which he could not live for even a few days without starting to hyperventilate. The two suitcases of belongings O'Neill had stored for him after he went to Abydos had grown considerably since then. Things brought back from the 'gate, no doubt, or else inherited from Nick, or the remainder and reminders of his life with Sha're, O'Neill wasn't sure which. In the past, they had always tried to leave one another clearly delineated areas of personal space. Well, perhaps not so clearly delineated, but both of them had too many minefields in their personal history to make it possible to just pick up an item at random and say 'Where did you get this?' There was always the risk it would turn out to be a present from a dead or divorced wife, a dead parent or child. 

A homeless Daniel could take temporary shelter in his best friend's house. That was fine. And they could delay finding the perfect apartment for a while, a few weeks anyway, but eventually Daniel would have his own place again, and O'Neill would have his guest room back instead of filled with Daniel's books. They would still snatch time together, of course, spend evenings and nights and days and missions and vacations together, but there would be times when everything would feel empty again, and the evenings would pass slowly, and the nights be filled with the wrong kinds of silence, but for the moment they could snatch another stolen interlude out of the main stream of their lives, one where they lived together and could sleep in the same bed, without fear of interruption. He bent and kissed Daniel's lips, and even if the setting was different, the taste was the same. They were less salty now and he didn't smell of sweat and sunlight, only of soap and sleep, but the underlying Daniel flavor was exactly the same, and the warmth of his body was every bit as comforting as when the tide had rolled in and the palm trees swayed gently in the warm night breeze.

Their tongues touched, then wrapped around one another lazily. The sex had been earlier, this bed christened many times now, a point they had to keep proving to one another that they were home and their desire hadn't fizzled when the prospect of imminent death wasn't hovering over them like an ash cloud. In fact sex had turned out to be even better on a bed with a soft mattress and a shower just off the bedroom, and lube that didn't smell of fish, and food that could be eaten without hours of preparation. Civilization had turned out to be just fine after all, although they still both flinched a little from crowds, and traffic sounds, and had felt so dehydrated by forced separation from the sea for the first few days they had driven into the mountains to sit by a river and let the sound of the restless water soothe them.

Even the low hum of the telephone sounded loud in the stillness. Daniel finished kissing him and then turned over to pick it up. A mistake, of course. But they hadn't been born knowing how to handle this, they were still learning. He winced apologetically then said, "Hi, Sam."

O'Neill looked at the clock. Three a.m. Carter's wake up from her nightmare time. Needing to know what was real and what was dreamed, both equally vivid. Daniel was saying the same things as last night. Yes, they were alive. Yes, they had been missing, that was all true, but they were back now. Did she want him to come over there and pinch her? Carter's voice was a muffled murmur of sound, words he couldn't quite make out, but Daniel's answers made it pretty easy for him to guess the question. 

"No, you didn't wake me. What about…oh, Jack...?" A glance in his direction. "He's in his room."

Not a lie. O'Neill was indeed in his room.

"No, not the guest room. Remember? Jack's storing a few books for me. His couch is comfortable though."

Not exactly a lie either. O'Neill thought his couch was very comfortable. The fact Daniel wasn't actually sleeping on it was neither here nor there.

"No, I don't expect you woke him. He sleeps pretty deeply."

And again, when he was asleep he slept deeply and Carter had indeed not woken him. Perhaps this was part of what being a linguist was about, a certain mastery over words.

A penitent-sounding murmur from Carter and a shrug from Daniel, "Who cares if you did? He can make me some coffee." A pointed glance in O'Neill's direction. 

O'Neill sighed. Who but an addict wanted a stimulant at three in the morning? Who but a complete jerk got out of his nice warm bed to make aforementioned addict his drug of choice at that hour of the morning when it would only make him hyper and cranky? Well, the other O'Neill no doubt. That guy was probably running around in his dressing gown every night trying to keep Jackson provided with caffeine and chocolate while the guy squinted at artifacts and compensated with blow-jobs. No way was that an equal relationship. That O'Neill was just a hapless slave to his hormones and Jackson's baby blues. Which kind of served the guy right so he wasn't going to lose any sleep over it. It was just cosmic justice, perhaps, that as a payment for doing all those damned distasteful things, O'Neills the dimensions over got to fall in love with the most unsuitable and maddening people they could find, at least two had ended up with Carter – and dead, and at least two had ended up with Daniel, and – so far at least – alive but decidedly traumatized. The mirror still freaked him out and the thought of all those different universes gave him a buzzing pain in the head, like a bluebottle trapped in his cerebellum, but a glimpse of one world where a Jack O'Neill was happily married to Sara and watching Charlie play softball would have been nice. It had to be out there somewhere. Perhaps if Narim went on with his experiments and ever found one, he could take a picture to let O'Neill know how that looked.

He noticed he was in the kitchen and the floor was cold on his bare feet. Daniel was still talking to Carter, he could hear the low hum of their conversation seeping out from the bedroom. Teal'c had called earlier. He always sounded so awkward about it, as if the telephone was some strange creature he shouldn't really handle, difficult for a hundred year old Jaffa to admit he needed to touch base with reality after kel no reem, but that was the truth. O'Neill thought they might have to record a message on the answering machine saying: "Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson aren't in right now, but it isn't because they're in another dimension or even in a different part of the universe. They just popped out for groceries. They really will be home soon." But it would just be tempting fate to ever record something like that. Sure as eggs were eggs they'd get stranded off world again the very next mission out. Better just to field phone calls from twitchy teammates.

He made the coffee, fetched the square bottle of Jack Daniels they had purchased together as a private joke and affirmation, picked up two glasses, realized why Sara had always told him to use a tray but stubbornly persisted in carrying them all gingerly without one, coffee splashing on his nice polished wooden floor, glasses clinking perilously. All the while, Carter was still talking. Daniel was just making soothing noises of agreement now, reassuring her about something. As he entered the bedroom, O'Neill saw the duvet had slipped down so that it barely covered Daniel's modesty, and O'Neill admired the classical shape of his back, those broad shoulders tapering to that narrow waist, lean muscle beneath the smooth skin, perfect ass almost exposed. Carter was probably picturing Daniel in pajamas but he was beautifully naked. He wondered how Carter would react if he mentioned Daniel's unclothed state. Sighing, he knew that teasing her wasn't an option. He bet she wore pajamas though, she just wasn't the babydoll nightie type. A shame, really. She and Daniel could have sleepovers in their jammies. In some universes they were probably step-siblings. In others they would be married. That was a freaky thought. Think about that too much and he would get a little tetchy at her calling up his other half at three in the morning while Daniel sat there in the altogether cooing at her down the phone.

He climbed into the bed gingerly and nuzzled his shoulder before proffering the coffee. Daniel, took the mug and smiled at him, sipping gratefully while telling Carter she hadn't done anything wrong and he was sure Narim understood how things were, it was only a few months since Martouf had died, no one could expect her to just shake off a loss like that in a hurry. There was plenty of time, Daniel said, and some relationships were worth taking slowly. No point in rushing something that was meant to mature gradually.

O'Neill smiled at that and stroked Daniel's thigh, thinking all the same that he sounded like the monk guy. Any minute now he was going to start talking about bulrushes and meals not being cooked in a slow enough oven getting unpleasant chewy bits in them or the like. Wasn't Carter reassured yet? He loved her to pieces but, sheesh, she was getting neurotic in her old age. Strike that. Probably not safe even to think that. Daniel had told him many times that if he ever mentioned the words 'biological clock' in front of Carter it would probably be the last thing he ever did with an unventilated viscera. Apparently there were some things about which women just had no sense of humor. O'Neill mimed putting down the phone. Daniel rolled his eyes at him in protest. O'Neill made yanking wires out of the wall motions and Daniel gave him a blood-freezing glare. 

"What was that, Sam? Sorry, Jack was… Yes, he's awake. No, it wasn't the phone. They're probably playing hockey in Estonia or something. You know how many channels he has. Oh, anything with balls as far as I can tell. He'd watch a lacrosse tournament just to have a commentator yelling in his ear. Sure you can come apartment hunting with me. I've got all those months of back pay to spend so something with a sunken bath should suit me fine…"

O'Neill sighed and poured them both a glass of whiskey. As Daniel drained his coffee and placed the mug on the bedside locker, O'Neill put the glass in his hand and then clinked his against it, mouthing 'Cheers' at him. Daniel gave him a gentle smile in return, held the receiver against his chest momentarily and whispered 'Cheers' back. O'Neill spilt a drop of whiskey onto Daniel's bare back and then bent his head to lick it off. He heard Daniel's voice tighten, a gasp from the moment when his tongue made contact with skin, and then he was speaking rapidly, "Got to go, Sam. Jack wants me to watch the game with him. I know. We must both still be on Island Time. Sweet dreams." A pause. "Love you too." Then the receiver was replaced very gently.

"You two are so sappy." O'Neill spilt another drop of whiskey down his back, noticing the way it so slowly hurdled the knots of his spinal column before he bent to lick it off.

"We just don't have the intimacy issues some other people of our acquaintance have." Daniel took a sip of whiskey, closing his eyes as the burn of it hit the back of his throat. 

O'Neill looked up, licking his lips. "You're sappy and you know it."

"I wasn't the one who cried all the way through 'Brian's Song'."

They kissed, whiskey-flavored tongues burning from the aftermath of the liquor. Comforting to know that even if they both turned into lushes they'd still taste good. They pulled back reluctantly, needing air, and Daniel said a little breathlessly, "You can go to sleep, Jack. I'll still be here when you wake up."

"I know. For now, I just wish…" He didn't finish the sentence. No point. They both wished they could be here like this forever, with no deception necessary. Daniel had broken a glass just yesterday, asking what kind of world did they live in that was less evolved than an ancient Athenian society that condoned slavery and didn't allow women the vote? Launching into a rant against the narrowness of small town bigotry that could infect an entire continent of such scope and magnitude as theirs. The whole damned universe at their fingertips and they had to skulk in the shadows, lie like criminals every time they came home. O'Neill had let him have his rant, feeling like the shore when the waves beat against it. Sometimes it was better just to let the sea have its day of wrath, its tempests and its storms. This was just the time and country into which they had been born. They hadn't shaken off the nineteen fifties that successfully yet, that was all, but they had microwaves and hot water and they knew things about the stars that made his head spin, could do incredible things in surgery, bring dying kids back from the brink. Sometimes anyway. Three thousand years ago in some places now full of ruins and old dust he could have had a wife and a lover with no real social opprobrium, and Charlie wouldn't have killed himself with O'Neill's gun because his gun wouldn't have existed, but Sara would have died in childbirth and Charlie with her because they didn't know how to do transfusions back then, and even if he'd still hooked up with Daniel he would have lost him too when his appendix burst. So he still preferred now and having clean water out of the faucet at the flex of a wrist, and he would put up with the bigotry and hypocrisy and general unquestioning brain-aching stupidity of some of the people with whom he shared a planet because he believed it was getting better, not worse. Daniel always ranted about people who saw human evolution as a progression. He knew too much about what had been lost on the journey. But O'Neill believed in happy endings. He needed to believe things were getting better even if sometimes the evidence out there didn't seem to support it. He hadn't got where he was today not believing in the impossible, and, as he'd told Daniel after that rant to end all rants, Daniel should be grateful for that, as Daniel was certainly a Webster's definition of impossible and O'Neill had always believed in him. 

Now, Daniel ran a hand across O'Neill's chest, long elegant fingers as tapered as a piano player's, absently stroking the graying fuzz upon his skin. He bent his head and mouthed a nipple, more reflective than seductive, then kissed a line down O'Neill's ribcage, still a little absent-minded, tongue touching skin the same way he ate while reading. O'Neill inhaled as he felt a warm tongue lap gently down his ribs, across his abdomen, to nuzzle at his hip. A thumb stroked curiously across the faint line of hair from his navel to his groin, his body like some fascinating instrument Daniel was contemplating playing. Daniel rubbed his face gently against O'Neill's skin and closed his eyes. O'Neill felt poised between wanting and not wanting Daniel to start coaxing him into hardness, always glad of an orgasm, but too tired to go through the preliminaries to get there right now. But Daniel just kept stroking his thumb across that downy fur above O'Neill's limp loins, his face resting on O'Neill's hip.

"What…?" O'Neill enquired after a moment.

Daniel looked up. "We're here, that's all. Somewhere I never thought we'd be." O'Neill patted his chest invitingly, and with a last stroke of O'Neill's abdomen, Daniel wriggled sleepily up the bed. "We got home."

He knew that 'home' wasn't just this grid reference in the galaxy, but this relationship. From self-deception and infidelity and near-death and too many near-misses to count, they had finally made it into the same bed in the same universe at the same time.

It was as if the full magnitude of it had just hit him, and, looking around the bedroom, O'Neill realized it was something he was still grappling with himself. Everything he'd thought lost forever found once again. He still had all those pictures of Charlie, could put a video in the VCR if he was feeling brave enough and watch the tape Sara had made for him when he'd been away on some damned mission and Charlie had taken his first steps. Listen to her commentating to him through tears of happiness and frustration: "I wish you were here, Jack. I wish you were here." Daniel still had the books in which his parents had written their names, could still run his fingertip across his father's neat black print, could look at photographs of them smiling and remember better days. Carter and Teal'c were a phone-call away to talk to, a short car ride away to see, and not lost forever beyond an uncrossable galaxy anymore. Reality had waited for them. Even love had waited for them, patient and faintly amused it had taken them so long to get where they were meant to be.

Daniel smiled, looking around the room himself before gazing back at O'Neill. "We're home, Jack. We're really home." And then his eyes asked a question to which the only possible answer was a kiss.

The End.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Stargate Sg-1 and its characters are the property of Stargate (II) Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author. This story may not be posted elsewhere without the consent of the author.


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